Mr. Pat Barry:

There is great opportunity in local authority mortgages to incentivise developers to build higher-quality homes. At the moment, one can borrow up to €250,000 in a rural area and I think €325,000 in an urban area. However, no criteria are set for what type of house for which one can borrow. One could buy an F-rated or an A1-rated house and there is no differential in the quality of home, so there is real opportunity to set criteria there. There are also opportunities in the construction of public housing, for example. The National Treasury Management Agency, NTMA, released a green bond last year, and it is oversubscribed. The way green bonds work is that Exchequer spending, typically investment in decarbonising the grid or in things like flood relief measures, is packaged as green. There is an opportunity there because if we went for really ambitious standards of social housing, that could then be rated as green and be packaged up as part of the green bond for sale internationally.