Mr. Jim Gannon:

It has been up on our website since the start of the year that applications close this year on 17 July, which is another week. Anyone advising people in their homes or anyone who has gone to the website will know that is the date for the end of this year. It is traditional that we have a closing date for the programmes.

I will quickly pick up on the other point, which relates to finance. I will go back to the slide where I showed what deep retrofit means and what is involved in moving from where the average house is to B2. We are not asking everyone to look at €50,000 or €100,000. What we are saying to people is we need to collectively understand that a B2 level retrofit is something smaller than that. Looking at the cost optimal study we completed for the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government when it was looking at the renovation regulations, that could be €15,000, €20,000 or €25,000, which is still a lot of money. We still need to get over that hump.

A key point in someone's decision-making cycle will be the purchase of a house. It is perhaps the only point in time when one is talking about an even bigger sum. In Europe, they are now looking at green mortgages where it is being considered whether finance could be facilitated with a lower mortgage rate for a better house. Domestically, the home renovation incentive has worked and we need to look at tax rebate in the UK. They are also looking at stamp duty rebate and whether that would incentivise an upgrade at the point of purchase.

In Ireland, we have tested finance for retrofit with the credit unions, some of the high street banks and an employer model with a number of different employers, which operates like the bike-to-work scheme whereby they would finance and work through the salary on their side of the net. No one has been static on this. Reflecting on Europe, in no jurisdiction do they have a single offering that works. It is important for us also to understand that in Ireland a single offering may not work, and that a certain demographic might always need grants. For some, it might be at the point of mortgage and for others it might be taxation. We need to think of a blend, but we do not have the answer yet.