How Many BREEAM Buildings Are There in Ireland? 173 In Use

Liffey Valley Shopping Centre

The only Outstanding in the Irish set, and by a wide margin — the next-best score is 79.0%. Hines confirms the rating on its own property page, dated 2024.

What makes it interesting is what it isn't. This is not a new low-energy office. It's a 1990s out-of-town shopping centre of roughly 828,000 sq ft at the M50/N4 interchange, opened in 1997–98, with more than 3,400 car parking spaces. On embodied carbon or transport emissions it is among the least defensible building typologies in the country. It still outscores every purpose-built green office in Ireland.

That gap is the most useful thing in this dataset. In-Use rewards operational management: metering, policies, procurement, monitoring — the things a large asset with a full-time facilities team and an institutional owner can resource properly. Read a high In-Use score as evidence of good asset management, not good architecture.

PM Technology Building, Cork

Certificate BIU00000059-3.0. The serial number is the story: number 59 in the entire In-Use series, now on its third version. Almost certainly the oldest continuously maintained BREEAM In-Use registration in Ireland, and among the earliest anywhere.

PM Group is an employee-owned international project delivery firm describing itself as engineers, architects, project managers and constructors, headquartered in Dublin with 24 offices worldwide. The building at Lough Mahon Technology Park, Blackrock, is their own Cork office.

For vetting purposes that's a real signal: a firm that has kept its own building certified since the scheme's infancy is demonstrating something more durable than a sustainability page. PM Group is also an IGBC member. Their work is heavily pharma, med-tech, food and data centres rather than housing or retrofit, so relevance depends on the brief.

Spencer Place Residential

The highest-scoring building in Ireland that isn't a shopping centre, and the top residential asset by a clear margin — the next-best residential score is 73.2%. Part of the Spencer Place development on North Wall Quay, assessed by CBRE Advisory Ireland, valid to March 2028.

Notable because the Excellent band is otherwise packed into 70–75%. Spencer Place is the one entry that looks like it was built and run to a standard rather than to a threshold. If you want a case study of Irish residential done to a genuinely higher operational standard, this is the outlier.

Mahon Point Shopping Centre, Cork

Certificate BIU00001625-4.0 — a low serial and a fourth version, meaning Deka Immobilien has recertified this asset repeatedly over many years. Cork's only Excellent, and the only non-Dublin Excellent in the country.

The pairing with Liffey Valley is instructive. The two best-performing assets in Ireland are both suburban shopping centres, both German-institutionally owned, both with long recertification histories. Long-run ownership by a European institution with ESG reporting obligations looks like the strongest predictor of a high score here — stronger than building age, type or design quality.

Dockline

The floor of the dataset, and worth including precisely because it is. A modern office on the north docks, owned by UBS Asset Management, certified at 18.2% and valid until June 2028.

An 18.2% certificate is a landlord establishing a baseline for ESG disclosure, not making a sustainability claim. The same owner's unnamed D02 asset sits at 34.1%; Hines' two Grafton lots at 27.0% and 26.4%. These entries show certification being used as a reporting instrument across whole portfolios regardless of performance — which means the presence of a BREEAM In-Use certificate, on its own, tells you almost nothing. Only the band and the score do.