Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the witnesses. It is a no-brainer that we should be backing these initiatives. I am very interested in the deep retrofitting of homes. The quality of some housing in this country is very poor owing to shoddy building in the past. Houses in many of the old council estates require deep retrofitting and this should be strongly recommended in the committee's report not only because this would help in terms of our climate change targets but because it is sensible in terms of ensuring the long-term healthy lifestyle of our population and it has the added benefit of creating tends of thousands of sustainable jobs. This issue should be a strong feature of our report, as should wind energy, solar energy and so on.

I would like to make an observation. One could not say "No" to anything that has been said here. From a scientific and societal point of view, all that has been said is very sensible. How we do force the Government and successive Governments to take this issue seriously and to ring-fence the financing required to ensure that it happens in a timely way. We are in a race against time. Mr. Wheeler mentioned in his opening statement that almost 15 years on from the construction of the Arklow offshore energy bank an opportunity has not been seized, which is shocking. To continue to do what we are doing is insane. We need to listen to the scientific and technological submissions on all options and we need to have a discussion about how politically we can force this onto the agenda in a way that ensures the Government takes it seriously.

The committee previously looked at a project on the Arran Islands off the west coast. Small scale community projects like this and the St. Fintan's high school project, which involves students trying to solar power their school, matter as much as the big projects. If we are not being listened to at the top, politically, then this has to be driven at grass-roots level, using the examples of schools and communities that are trying to get us to change and working with the companies which are leading the advances in this area.