Our guest on this episode is Helena Fitzgerald, a passive house designer, and architect whose experience of building her own passive house led her to move beyond architecture.

Taking a stance on passive house - as an attempt to be green - prompted self-reflection in Helena, which took her career off on what might seem a wild tangent. Now a research fellow in the Department of Economics at the University of Limerick, Helena's new direction is focused on equitable, community-centric, scalable sustainability.

Helena's home is a striking, architect-designed, one-off passive house. It's a home beyond reproach in terms of energy efficiency, although we might query the stove today, knowing what we now know about biomass. That said, its rural location bakes in car dependency and renders it a home that couldn't be for everyone - criticisms that are addressed directly, and thematically, in the course of our conversation.

As ever, it was a roving conversation with familiar themes: the importance of acting in a manner that is results-driven to guarantee desirable outcomes; technology on its own isn't enough, systemic solutions and localised community engagement are just as integral.

We even start nudging at revolution.


Notes from the episode

**SOME SELF-PROMOTING CALLS TO ACTION**
We don't actually earn anything from this, and it's quite a lot of work, so we have to promote the day jobs.