Professor John FitzGerald:

The vast bulk of it will have to come from their own resources. The State cannot pick up the tab. It would require a major increase in taxation or a reduction in other services to do it. That is a big ask. The question is how best to go about it.

Many people are prepared to spend their own money but do not how to do it. I have talked to a significant number of people about the problems in doing it. The €20 million ring-fenced for the midlands is a beginning to the strategy. We know the State owns 100,000 or 150,000 local authority dwellings. As the landlord, the obligation is on the State to upgrade those dwellings. We could begin there and offer several contracts to upgrade 1,000 local authority dwellings next year. The number the following year could increase to 2,000 and then 5,000 after that. In that way, a builder can know that if he specialises in that area, he will have a growing volume of activity.

There is one case in Kilkenny. Kilkenny County Council upgraded a local authority estate. It got an engineer and sourced a builder. Since the council was doing a large number of houses together, it got a good deal. An engineer checked that the specifications were right and the job was done correctly. What happened was that the private owners of the former local authority houses in the estate asked if they could pay for their houses to be retrofitted too. They were prepared to pay for their houses to be done because the hard work had been done by the council. That is the model. We should begin with the local authority dwellings. It has the benefit that, on average, people in local authority dwellings are less well off than people in the community as a whole. Also, many of them are elderly and may not spend enough on heating. If we upgrade their dwellings, it may lead to a health improvement. There will certainly be an income distribution benefit. Moreover, we help to develop the capacity for the rest of the community. That is why we have suggested beginning there.

Giving me a grant to do up my house is a waste of money. For many people, the problems of doing up the house and the disruption are a far greater concern. I wrote about how my wife and I did a job on our house a decade ago. We probably need to do another one. It was driven by my wife because she said we needed to be ready for our wheelchairs. The chaos in the house was something else. I will not say it caused a divorce - happily, we have been married for more than 40 years - but the disruption to life in making the change was significant. If a homeowner upgrades the house to a BER A2 rating, it may be necessary to put in underfloor heating. That means taking everything down. We need to look at how to do this in the least disruptive fashion and help people to do it. I will go back to what I said about schemes with farmers. We need to understand the obstacles first. We should begin with local authority dwellings where there are multiple benefits, spend the scarce resources there and see how we get on.