Unlike their counterparts in most other European countries, the vast majority of Irish businesspeople have been reluctant to embrace the environmental movement. This is is despite the fact that the two Irish businesspeople most associated with 'green' businesses, Eddie O'Connor and Gerry McCaughey, have done extraordinarily well.

Mr O'Connor pocketed €50m for his shareholding in wind energy firm Airtricity when the company was sold for over €1bn in 2008, while Mr McCaughey walked away with €31m for his 32pc of Century Homes when the company was sold to Kingspan in 2005.

Traditionally, most Irish homes have been constructed using concrete blocks and brick. However, the Irish preference for using brick and concrete to build houses is very much the exception rather than the rule. In most other countries, timber is the building material of choice for single-family homes. In the United States, over 90pc of all homes are timber-framed.

Until the early 1990s, timber-framed houses were about as common as hen's teeth in Ireland.

The market was confined to a number of small firms who supplied prefabricated kits to customers who were building one-off homes on sites they had already purchased. All of the big house builders were firmly in the bricks and concrete camp.

Regulations

The cause of timber-framed construction wasn't helped by the building regulations of the time, which explicitly favoured concrete and brick over timber. Most concrete and brick was produced by CRH, then, as now, Ireland's largest indigenous industrial company.

However, timber-framed houses have many advantages over their brick and concrete counterparts. Unlike brick or concrete homes, which have to be built on site, timber-framed homes can be manufactured in kit form in a factory and later assembled on site.

This means that not alone is timber-framed construction considerably quicker than traditional building methods, it is much cheaper.

It is possible to erect a timber-framed house in about half the time it takes to put up a comparable brick or concrete structure. Another advantage enjoyed by timber-framed houses during the building boom was that they eliminated the need for expensive blocklayers.

It is also possible to achieve much better quality standards as the kits are manufactured to much higher levels of accuracy than it is possible to achieve with a brick or concrete home being built from scratch on site.

On their own, none of these advantages would have been sufficient to drive the advance of timber-framed construction methods. What has propelled the advance of timber-framed construction from virtually nothing in the early 1990s to over a quarter of all homes now being built in Ireland is the fact that wood is a much better insulator than either brick or concrete.

Advantage

As insulation standards have been progressively raised, culminating in the new building regulations which came into force in 2008, this has given timber a growing advantage over traditional construction methods.

Born in Co Monaghan almost 47 years ago, Mr McCaughey graduated from UCD with a commerce degree in 1985. With jobs scarce in the depressed Ireland of the mid-1980s, he emigrated to the United States for five years.

While in the United States, he noticed that the vast majority of houses were timber-framed and that this form of construction was much cheaper than the methods being used in Ireland at the time.

When he returned to Ireland in 1990, he teamed up with his father and brother to form Century Homes.

In 1990, timber-framed houses had just 2pc of the Irish housebuilding market. Over the following decade-and-a-half, Mr McCaughey, in addition to serving as Century's chief executive, became the Irish evangelist for timber-framed homes.

At one stage it seemed that no business conference was complete without the presence of Gerry extolling the benefits of timber-framed houses.

He also became a regular guest on RTE's 'Questions & Answers' programme, where his no-nonsense style was in stark contrast to the stuffed shirt persona favoured by most senior businesspeople.

So successful was Mr McCaughey in selling the benefits of timber-framed housing that by the middle of this decade it had grabbed over a quarter of the market.

Century was by far the biggest player in the timber-framed housing business in Ireland and had also expanded into the UK. Century achieved sales of €69m and operating profits of €9.6m in 2004.

In 2005, Century was purchased by Kingspan for up to €98m. The price, just over 10 times operating profits, led many observers to wonder if Mr McCaughey had sold out too cheaply.

He hadn't. With housing output this year likely to be little more than a quarter of the record 93,000 new houses and apartments built in 2006, it is now clear Mr McCaughey timed the sale of Century to perfection. As the housing market has collapsed, so have the share prices of construction-related companies, including that of Kingspan.

Way back in March 2005, when Kingspan's acquisition of Century was first announced, €98m would have been enough to buy just over 6pc of Kingspan. By this week, you could have bought almost 27pc of Kingspan for the same money.

Mr McCaughey stayed on as Century managing director for three years, leaving in January 2008 when the earn-out period agreed at the time of the Kingspan acquisition expired.

Unlike most of those involved in the construction industry, Mr McCaughey has never been a Fianna Fail supporter.

He ran unsuccessfully as a PD candidate in the 2002 general election, while in October 2006 former Justice Minister Michael McDowell appointed him chairman of the Property Registration Authority, the state agency which has been given the unenviable task of streamlining Ireland's creaking property registration system.

While Mr McCaughey's primary political allegiance lay with the PDs, he was also careful to maintain good relations with the Greens.

Given the environmentally friendly nature of timber-framed housing, it was inevitable that the Greens would seek to claim him as one of their own. Mr McCaughey has returned the compliment, addressing the 2007 Green Party conference.

Although Mr McCaughey couldn't be categorised as a Green Party supporter, there is no doubt that he and the junior government party agree on many issues.

So when Environment Minister and Green Party leader John Gormley was looking for a new chairman for the DDDA to replace Donal O'Connor following the latter's appointment as chairman of Anglo Irish Bank, Mr McCaughey was the obvious choice.

He will have his hands full sorting out the mess on Dublin's docklands.

Last month, the DDDA chief executive Paul Maloney told an Oireachtas committee that a consortium of which it was part was no longer paying interest on a €293m loan from Anglo. The loan had been used to fund the €412m purchase of the Irish Glass Bottle site at Ringsend in 2006.

The DDDA is also financially exposed following a High Court judgment last year that it had acted unlawfully in granting planning permission for an office development at North Wall Quay.

Given the potential liabilities it is now facing, Fine Gael has questioned the DDDA's solvency.

Cleaning out the can of worms on the quays is going to make selling the Irish on the benefits of timber-framed houses look like child's play.