Ms Marie Donnelly:

On wind and solar guidelines, the technology is changing. It is difficult to include it in legislation but operational guidelines make sense. What is happening in community involvement under the RES, renewable energy systems, is the way forward. It is an issue that not only arises in Ireland but also at European level. The new renewable directive makes citizens and community involvement a legal requirement and gives every citizen in Europe the right to produce, consume, store and sell electricity. That is a right that is coming through for everyone in the legislation. To exercise that right, it is for people to decide that they or their community wish to do it themselves or, where a developer wishes to do it, that the developer must speak to them.

One issue where Ireland has a challenge is that we do not have solar farms. We do not know what it means to have a solar farm. We should have one at the very least so that people could go and see it. The level of negative reaction to renewable energy for solar farms is very low across Europe. It is higher for onshore wind, but low for solar because in virtually every other member state individuals can install solar panels on their roof and sell electricity to the grid. They are not excluded from the technology. That is a very important element in the acceptance of the technology. When individuals can generate and use renewable energy, they understand how a developer might use it in a wind farm.

On housing, this is a long discussion. If we look at what is happening in other countries, Ireland is not unique in our housing being in need of retrofitting. Different approaches are taken in different countries. I will take Germany first. Germany has an aggressive policy of retrofitting because it has the KfW bank in place. It is a public bank, backed by state guarantee and so has AAA rating for borrowings. It lends for retrofit at interest rates of between 0.49% and 1.5% so loans are almost free. It comes with technical assistance on what householders need to do, how they need to do it and where. That is a model that the Irish Government has looked at and not taken forward, but is one that I strongly recommend. It is a really good model that can and should be transplanted into the Irish context. If one can borrow at interest rates of that order, it is a better way to move.

Other countries have different policies. Take the Netherlands, whose housing stock outside Amsterdam is not dissimilar to that around the South Circular Road in Dublin. There are long rows of houses, maybe two storeys high, relatively compact, and they have what they call the energiesprong system where, off-site, they build and prepare padding, although it is more complicated than that. This is transported on a big truck and stuck onto the outside of the house. The roof is changed solar panels installed on it. The kitchen and bathroom are also changed because that is always popular among residents. This is done in one day and because it is prepared off-site the quality of the padding, what one could describe as the tea cosy, is assured. It is done commercially and with a phased payment. It is done a great deal for social housing. The laws in the Netherlands have been changed to allow part of a tenant's rent to be used to pay for this retrofitting over a period.

In France, the Île-de-Paris local authority managed to get a very substantial loan from the European Investment Bank, EIB, to retrofit 40,000 apartments on the periphery of Paris. It will take place over five years. Once again, this is done at preferential interest rates. They are managing the process, that is, the technology side, so that people do not have to worry about it, and phasing repayment from the people using and renting the apartments over a period of years.

What one sees across Europe is government policy to make funding available, on the one hand, and local government taking action to support people in the transition. The local authority tends to be a trusted source. People can believe it and rely on it in order to help deliver. If one can get scale, there will be efficiencies and efficiencies bring costs down. Those are a couple of examples that we could use in the Irish context.

Under the directive, the retrofitting of public buildings is a legal requirement and 3% of public buildings must be retrofitted each year. Ireland has taken a stronger position on public buildings, setting a retrofitting target of 33% by 2020. The difficulty with public buildings is that some are large and others small. Until recently, there was a difficulty in that if public money was used to retrofit a public building, and this funding was borrowed, that was included in the Government's balance sheet as a debt. That was due to a technical guideline introduced by the European Union's statistical agency EUROSTAT in 1995. This is why technical guidelines make me nervous. The guideline, which was introduced in advance of the euro, enumerated the things that count as public debt. At that time, no one even considered retrofitting buildings, energy performance contracts and energy services companies, ESCOs, but once this started to take a life of its own, this guideline meant that we could not make it happen in Europe. It took us six years to get around that guideline, including two vice presidents of the Commission leaning on EUROSTAT to get it produce a explanatory note, as it did a year and a half ago. This sets out the conditions whereby the public sector can contract with an energy performance company under which the company does the retrofit, carries the risk and is repaid over a period of years.