Businessman says he could solve housing crisis with modular homes from new Cork base

“We want to work with the Government and developers,” he said.

We can make thousands, tens of thousands of houses a year. We’re here to help.

“We could do this in lots of countries but given my Irish background, we want to do this here first.” 

He was speaking during a site visit to the former Orchard warehousing facility near Glanmire, on the outskirts of Cork City, where Cork County Council has granted planning to Sea Box Group Holdings Ltd for the regeneration of the site as its new Irish base.

It will include the fitting-out of two containers as housing units for display.

The development will also have a training room to showcase the company’s range of products, including its NRG Eco-Plus pre-plumbed heating system solution which can be retrofitted into old heating systems in half the time.

Sea Box specialises in the use, reuse or customisation of 20ft or 40ft shipping containers.

It has worked for the US military, adapting containers for use as relocatable field hospitals, as air traffic control towers, to house flight training simulators and as personnel shelters.

It has major commercial customers around the world too.

It has converted containers into mass energy storage units, and it developed an energy storage solution for Dell in 2010, which was later sold on to Microsoft, to power the search engine Bing ahead of a Black Friday event. 

It has also converted containers to emergency shelters for the US Federal Emergency Management Agency for cities at risk of tornadoes and hurricanes.

But it is in housing where Mr Brennan thinks his company could have a real impact here.

Sea Box has two housing solutions — the converted shipping container for emergency housing, and its Cozy Home panel system for longer-term housing.

He says his firm could produce 150 container homes a day, each of which could be installed on a serviced site in just a few hours.

“They can come fully furnished and look quite nice, like a hotel room,” he said.

The Cozy Home unit, which consists of two three-bedroom semi-detached homes, can be erected in 24 hours, and plumbed and wired by a crew of five, working eight hours a day, in just three weeks, ready for occupation within a month. 

Each unit could be up to €50,000 cheaper than the average home today, Mr Brennan said.

"I don’t want to be the builder but I think we can be really good at supplying these systems to developers,” he said.

“I’d rather find and work with five or 10 big developers who have the serviced sites, and I’d rather sell 10,000 kits to them and teach them how to do it, like Ikea-style, and we'll help them until they learn it perfectly."

While modular housing has been used to house a few hundred Ukrainian refugees, it has not been used at scale to address the wider International Protection or migrant housing crisis.

Company representatives have met with the housing minister Darragh O’Brien, while Fianna Fáil TD for Cork North Central Padraig O’Sullivan said he was now trying to secure a meeting for them with the Integration Minister Roderic O’Gorman.

Mr O’Sullivan said the Government really needed to consider such emergency housing options now “in a serious way”.

“There is definitely a role for this model of emergency housing as an accommodation response for IPAS or migrants in a temporary capacity,” he said.

“In the longer term, the Cozy Homes solution is probably a bit of a challenge to people's concept of housing at the moment, but once it meets all the regulations and fire safety requirements, I think it could be a genuine solution in time.”