Michael Fitzmaurice: State procurement could boost wool insulation

A few things in your submission I was noting. You said the Welsh have set up their own system and they have their own installation. Is it competitive? How does it work? Tell us. What they did was they encouraged the state procurement of Welsh wool-based insulation. That's probably as much as I can tell you, but it was a change of procurement policy within the legislation. It could have been semi-state houses but I think one of the deputies already mentioned it. If we became the biggest customer for an insulation company here in Ireland to switch over to a biofibre, ideally sheep's wool, that would incentivise them to have a line of sheep's wool. We as farmers can't go out and become insulation manufacturers but if we incentivise the insulation manufacturers that are here on the island to switch to sheep's wool and the state be their first biggest customer, that's when we start to scale up. We've heard so many times about scale, possibly the reason why it's so expensive is because it's probably coming from Austria and they're not turning over enough. But if state procurement all over the EU, including Ireland, was to say this must be coming from biofibre that's grown in the country of origin, well then you now have a customer. Businesses want to make money. I'm no fool, I realise that. But if you go to the likes of Kingspan and Cavan and turn around and say to them that there's a 6 million euro contract in state insulation waiting for you, they'll be going out shearing the sheep themselves. Do you know what I'm saying? But we have to just, I don't know how you work it into policy, men. I don't know, I don't do policy. I don't know how you look at it. But I definitely think that the state could be our first biggest customer. Have you looked at the Welsh model that you've talked about there? How have they done? All I know is that they did it through incentivisation of the companies that are making the manufacturing to use Welsh wool in the insulation. That's as much as I can tell you, Deputy. You were saying that not to be rushing into a plant for doing all the works to get a market first. You spoke earlier that there's English companies and there's other companies in other places now vying for wool. Is that fair to say? They're vying to get the story right back to the farmer. Are they in competition looking for wool now? Well, the price of British wool has increased substantially in the last 12 months. And I wouldn't say there's anybody jumping over ditches to try and get into farms to buy wool. But there's a greater appreciation about the traceability of where the wool comes from. And if there's more in it, has the price gone up? Yes. And if they have found their market in the UK, and British wool has, and we'll say the Welsh have done their job, and the British wool have put in a fair bit of time into it. And you spoke about Portugal earlier. Why isn't world market prices of wool gone up so? Well, I believe they're being consolidated. I believe personally they're being suppressed. Because the demand for wool, if you look at the ESAT figures over the last 20 years, shows an incline, an increase, constant increase, in the demand for wool and natural fibres. The actual numbers of sheep in the world are actually starting to decline. But where that wool production has moved substantially is away from family farms in Australia, New Zealand, and places in Northern Europe. And there are huge farms starting to be growing merino wool in China now. There are similar to what you see beef lots in Canada, beef lots in America. So they're now starting to grow their own wool. Because they realise that there is a growth in this market. So I think myself- Is that by having sheep? Yes. Merino sheep. Yeah. Merino. Merino sheep. Yeah. But like, I don't know where the consolidation is coming from. But I do know that I researched recently the fact that there are only 18 substantial buyers of wool. 18 global players left. Now, if that was 28, there would be a lot more competition. And what you said that the facilities in the UK, if I brought over fleece as a wool, what does it cost to clean that wool per fleece? It's expensive depending on where you go. If you go to Bradford, there are two types of cleaning. There's a cleaning where they clean for carpets, which means that they extract as much lanolin. That's a lot cheaper. I can't tell you. I know that if you contacted any of the spinning mills here in Ireland, that they'd be able to give you the exact figure. But then if you bring it to the likes of a micro mill or a macro mill in Cornwall that do this beautiful work for you, that could be anything up to 10 euros a kilo. And there are two people in Ireland here that have licenses to micro clean wool, and they're charging 20 euros a kilo to clean that wool. So there's two places in Galway at the moment that have licenses to scour, but they're micro plants. And there's no reason why we can't. What they've done in the UK is they've started to lean towards these microprocessors or these micro plants, where you have the likes of the Ashtons going from, with their Rylands, going from sheep to farm. You have Eru in County Wicklow. There are probably about a dozen of these little industries sprouting up, but it's very difficult for them to get going. Very, very difficult for them to get going. My understanding is there is difficulty here in EPA licensing. Well, anybody that's got it just did what they had to do. I mean, it's not the EPA that are trying to close down the plants. It's what do we do with clean wool once it is clean? Have we a market for it? Do we spend millions on cleaning it and then have it sitting in a shed clean and no one to buy it from us? Has anyone done an analysis to see in insulation, when you clean it at the cost that's involved, how competitive it is? It's already been done in New Zealand. It's already been manufactured in Austria. Yeah, but I know, but I'm asking how competitive it is. If I'm building a house, or if I'm building 500 houses, and if I say, you know, I'd love to use Irish wool. I bet you would. In my insulation, but at the end of the day, there's a couple buying that house that it's going to be down to pounds, shillings and bits. Can anyone tell me what the price is? No. There's no difference. No, there's nobody can tell you. Despite all the millions, all the hundreds of thousands of euros that are going into academic research, there's nobody can tell you. There's actually an academic research done that showed that we couldn't justify a scouring plant. And the same university then received further academic research to find out what we could do with wool when we had it cleaned. There's no joined up thinking here. There's just, if you come up with a really good idea, if you come up with an idea that says, there's a good chance that I can increase the farmgate price of wool if I put 40,000 euros into the research of such and such a thing. You'll get it quicker than the price of farmgate wool. My understanding was there was research done for wool for fertiliser and wool for in gardens, thanks for bringing up that point. So there's money going into research to discover whether wool can be used as fertiliser. When the world over, wool is being used as fertiliser. Do you know what I'm saying? There's fertiliser pellet companies all across Europe. There's even one here, Larkfield pellets in Ireland. We know we can be used. What I can't understand is fertiliser is a dear commodity. Yes. Right? And it's getting dearer now. Yes. How come that with all the different angles, we've looked for pellets, we've looked for fertiliser, we're looking at it for insulation, we're looking at it. What I'm trying to find is a market or a competitive market that we can chip in again anyone that's there, make a good price for the farmer, above all things, but have it competitive as well. Is there any way of that happening? Yeah, we just need to tap into the existing textile and heritage market that we have here on the island. That's one thing that we can do. We can look at maybe public procurement of Irish-based insulation. The reason why wool is so expensive is because of the scale. It's not there in scale, it hasn't been scaled up. To compete with foam, to compete with polymers, to compete with any kind of synthetic or fossil fuel-based fibre is incredibly difficult, whether it's hemp or wool, it's incredibly difficult. If you have a mountainy sheep, which is totally different than wool, which is the hardest to work on? For what purpose? I'll bring them in. For all the purposes we've talked about. The mountain sheep wool can be used for absolutely everything. I've already said that even mountain sheep's wool, there's a company called Merrick, M-E-R-I-C-K, based in the UK, they're actually making jumpers from hill sheep wool. It all depends on whether the will and the way and the honesty and the integrity is there in the textile manufacturer to want to do it.