Mr. Declan Meally:

The better energy communities initiative has grown out of our efforts to look at how communities operate and work around energy. One of the things we have learned in recent years is the importance of having a champion for such initiatives, a concept the Chairman will be very familiar with in the context of his GAA experience. The better energy communities initiative involved finding champions in local communities and community groups and seeing how we could skill them up. Last year, we found champions in many guides, including, for example, a residents' association, a co-operative society and a local authority.

A particularly innovative example of such engagement was the decision by the Musgrave Group to champion a project. The company upgraded a number of its stores and a percentage of the grant that was due to the company was donated to local GAA clubs to allow them to upgrade. The 45% contribution from the Musgrave Group was matched with a 45% grant from SEAI, with the clubs having to put up only 10%. The Musgrave Group was able to organise the project management of that across several counties with an energy supplier. Members will see from the county-by-county list that 23 shops and 22 GAA clubs benefited from this work. It was championed by the Musgrave Group and involved only one application to SEAI. A project management team co-ordinated and funded the initiative through the Musgrave Group, providing the necessary technical and project management expertise.

We have been in discussions with GAA headquarters at Croke Park to see how that model could be expanded. Some 2,000 clubs around the country could potentially benefit and we are looking at scaling up the project. Moreover, the GAA itself could even take on the role of champion itself. The initiative has been particularly successful and encompasses a broad definition in terms of what can define a community. It can be a group of similarly-minded businesses, organisations or residents, or even, as happened in Tipperary, a group of households. It is about putting together a team to champion the application to SEAI. It is proving a very successful model.