The green, green grass of home has just become a whole lot greener. Ireland’s first house made of hemp is not only perfectly legal, but it could also provide a model for future house-building.

Set amid the rolling drumlins of rural Co Monaghan, the 450-sq-ft home is more environmentally friendly than conventional cement types, according to its owner. Marcus McCabe says cannabis’s cousin should become a staple building material.

“We live in a straw-bale house with a grass sod roof that we built in 1997. We decided to build a house from hemp but ran into difficulties. You can’t grow hemp here without a processor’s licence — even varieties with a negligible narcotic value — so we had to import enough for the house. It’s better than we could have imagined,” he says.

McCabe, who runs a business designing reed-bed water treatment systems and who was a Green party candidate in Cavan-Monaghan for the last general election, has been the butt of plenty of quips about his hemp house, but is adamant that the only dopes are those who insist on using fossil fuels to build.

“It takes a huge amount of energy to create a cement house. You have to start by quarrying rock out of the ground. These houses then produce lots of carbon dioxide. In contrast, only natural building materials are used in a hemp house and by using hemp, timber and lime, no carbon dioxide is produced. Instead, it actually reduces the amount of CO2 in the air,” he says.

McCabe, the son of the playwright Eugene McCabe, is planning to use his new hemp building as an office for Ecoflo Reedbeds, his sewage treatment business which he runs from the family farm in Burdautien, close to the border.

His hemp house has a plaster finish — what’s most remarkable, McCabe says, is that it is so unremarkable. Compared to the straw-bale house next door that McCabe calls home, it really is nondescript. “Hemp is such a versatile building material that you can build just about any house-type with it. Like concrete, it can be turned into bricks and blocks or can just be poured. It doesn’t take as long to dry and, when it does, it’s solid yet permeable, soaking up excess moisture. We’re planning to use the hemp house as an office but it will also double as accommodation during the summer when we run courses in organic gardening and sustainability,” he says. So, why aren’t we already using it? In 1997, the Department of Justice gave Teagasc’s crops research centre in Carlow a licence to grow hemp.

The agricultural development body concluded that hemp could indeed be cultivated successfully. They pointed to its widespread use in the early 1900s, when it was used for making everything from twine, rope and clothes to rigging, nets and sails for ships. And that was that. Since then, no processing licences have been granted.

In contrast, research is well underway in Northern Ireland where the crop unit of the Department of Agriculture and a company called Hemp Ireland, are carrying out a pilot study in Co Down.

In the republic, hemp advocates — an eclectic band of environmentalists, farmers, scientists and, well, hippies — have been kicking their Birkenstocks against a brick wall ever since.

But McCabe, for one, is determined that the cultivation of hemp isn’t just a pipe dream. The environmentalist, who leads a largely self-sufficient lifestyle with his wife, Kate, and three children, is so taken with his new building that he now plans to become a hemp dealer himself.

“New technologies are emerging that mean that decortication, or the process of separating hemp fibre from waste material, is much easier and quicker, so now is the time to move. The licensing situation has to be freed up. We’ve applied to begin production in 2005 and the Department of Agriculture have been very encouraging so far.

“At the moment, it’s not a viable alternative to concrete because it has to be imported. Concrete costs about €100 per cubic metre, while hemp costs about twice as much. But if we were growing 15 tons of dried hemp per hectare, we could charge competitive prices. In the space of a few months, building a house from hemp could be as cheap as building from concrete,” he says.

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