The healthcare sector in Ireland has begun to adopt the UK’s Health Technical Memorandum in terms of designing and building new hospital and healthcare facilities. The fundamentals of this document look to provide acoustic comfort within the facility, preserve speech privacy and confidentiality between spaces and limit the impact on noise upon near neighbours. HTM 08-01 has tended to be issued as a mandatory compliance document and therefore is more akin to the regulatory acoustic documents.

In the area of office acoustics the BREEAM and LEED accreditation schemes have begun to be adopted primarily by the large multinationals operating in Ireland. The BREEAM scheme has considered the issues of speech privacy between offices and speech intelligibility in boardrooms and video conference rooms. Meanwhile the LEED accredition scheme has been readily implemented by many of the American foreign multinationals operating within Ireland and takes strong heed of sound insulation between offices. Both schemes have considered the acoustic aspects of an office building and offered easily attainable credits.

The era of light touch acoustic regulation may be coming to a close and in its place a move towards a holistic view of a buildings, including the acoustic and noise control elements.