Mr. Brian Carroll:

I could come in on some of those questions. One thing that impacted quite severely on our capacity to meet our 2020 target was the economic downturn in terms of having the resources available to make the types of investments needed. Those resources were not available over the period of the economic downturn. In terms of retrofitting, the first thing to say is that we are not unique. These are difficult problems to solve and it is difficult to design policies that will work. The UK tried a green deal but it did not work there. There is a task force in the Department at the moment following on from the climate action plan that is trying to design an aggregation model, which I mentioned earlier. The idea is to group houses together, achieve economies of scale in retrofitting them, and also to find innovative financing mechanisms such as low interest, low cost loans that will enable people to finance the retrofitting and avail of the savings they will make on their energy bills. For those who are in fuel poverty, we have schemes where we 100% fund the retrofitting of their homes.

They are not asked to pay any money.