Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I absolutely agree with the Deputy that reaching out to communities is crucial. Someone asked me why we put it in as the last chapter rather than the first. That is a reasonably well-made point. I suppose the idea was to outline the scale of the challenges in the sectors and then see how we ensure that communities can participate.

I omitted to answer Deputy Dooley's question on microgeneration. We do need to consider planning restrictions. That is one of the areas. We need to consider the pricing. The Citizens' Assembly recommended a wholesale price and there is an EU obligation on us to pay. We are conscious of the need to think that through because some of the schemes elsewhere have run into difficulties of equity as between people who are selling into the grid and those who are not and the share out of the cost of running the grid. We have to make sure there is an equitable scheme there. We aim to have that worked out by the end of 2020, which is ahead of the legal obligation of 2021.

The sustainable energy communities are great exemplars. They have run from small to very large scale. The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, has very good experience in this. It has mentors and the opportunity to develop a plan and there is support for that. It then has the opportunity to implement that plan and there is another layer of support for that. The sums of money can be quite big. They require partnerships. It cannot be just the local authority. It has to involve multiple sectors within the community. The plan envisages that the number of those would grow sixfold over its course. We want to see far more people getting involved in that, as well as the sort of community participation that Deputy Dooley was talking about.

The details of the smart finance and the area-based schemes have yet to be worked out. There is no doubt that the local authorities and the housing associations are critical players or obligated entities, as they are called, which now support some of the sustainable energy communities, employers, funders and the State and the SEAI. We will have to design a package that can aggregate that work, take on the professional expertise in an effective way, reach out to communities in a way that is more effective than the one-off application form model and develop easier payment methods. We have seen the ability of the State in partnership with financial institutions in microlending to bring down that cost. It may involve the State taking a layer of the risk but we need to evolve that model. We are starting that work as a priority.

The full make-up of the implementation board has yet to be decided but we must make that the Secretary General to the Government and the Secretary General of my Department are at its core and that reporting is to the Taoiseach. Experience shows that creates a level of accountability that guarantees a much higher response rate to the actions we are putting in place.

The area-based scheme in the midlands is evolving and will involve local authorities, housing associations active in the area and other energy entities in the area, funders, employers, community groups. We need to get a group that is effective but also a model that can deliver effectively and the design of that is under way. The Government recognises that we need to do that and that proceeding on the present basis with subsidies will not get the scale of change we need.