Mr. Paul Kenny:

Carbon tax is being widely debated. It is my opinion, having been at the coalface of renovation in Ireland - our organisation is probably retrofitting more houses than anyone else in the country - that if we do not have a carbon tax, we will not achieve anything near the scale we need. That is absolutely clear. However, if we only have a carbon tax and do not do the market development stuff, we will not get anywhere. We need grants and carbon tax but we especially need to focus on skills, training, the one-stop-shops and the service provision. The state of Upper Austria focuses a third of its budget on ensuring that when one wants to renovate one's house, instead of having a list of BER assessors who do not answer their phones, there is a professional service at the other end of the phone which commits to attending at one's home to specify the renovation and the contractor will come out the following week to start work. That is what we need. We must move to a position where it is easy for people to do this and they pay €300 per month or €500 per month for five or ten years, however much it costs, and it becomes really easy. If that is delivered, there will be much less need for carbon tax and grants to achieve the same results. Realistically, considering the scale of the challenge to go from 1,000 renovated homes to 45,000, we need all three measures at a significant scale. That is very important. We need to change from a completely hands-off, market led approach because the State needs to intervene. It is much cheaper to intervene through training and capacity building than it is to hope that the market will do that on its own.