Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

The retrofitting of 50,000 houses is probably going to be one of the most complex targets because we are talking about 50,000 families and 50,000 different types of house. Sometimes it is easier to do one big project than 50,000 individual ones. They are not small projects. We are talking about deep retrofitting. The cost is not insignificant at between €30,000 and €50,000 a year depending on the house. The key will be public buy-in and that it is seen as a good investment and it is the right thing to do. One of the reasons it may take time to ramp up is due to the fact that at the moment we do not have the workers in place with the necessary skills to do the work at that scale. As part of the summer economic stimulus package and again in the budget we significantly invested in new apprenticeships and education and training programmes for people with the necessary skills. The Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, spoke earlier this morning about how we are going to ramp that up. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions estimates that we need something like 30,000 jobs in the area. In truth, a year ago, if one talked to people in the industry, they could not get anyone as there was a labour shortage. That has changed now because we have such high unemployment but even then, it will take time for us to ramp up the skills to be able to do that work, which is skilled and labour intensive. It will also take us time to set up and put in place, but I am confident we can do it in the early to middle part of next year in terms of providing the necessary finance and other mechanisms. It will be a case of learning from neighbours. That will help to determine our ambition, which is that it will build up and ramp up very significantly. That is not a small challenge, and in some ways, it is probably bigger. It would be much easier to deliver 5 gigawatts of offshore wind in the next ten years than it would be to retrofit 50,000 houses because we are talking about seven or eight projects and one client compared to 500,000 projects.

Increasingly, one of the reasons it seems to take very long to do anything in the country is the planning process. The timeline for a project of any scale is at least ten years. That hinders flexibility, speed, action on climate and so on. On the other hand, one wants to get the planning right. One wants to get consultation right and to have public support and engagement. There is an issue regarding resources and planning officers within the planning system. It is very frustrating for all concerned, whether one is an objector or a developer. It is a ten-year process one is engaged in whether one is worried about one's local community being affected or what one's investment prospects are.

In this instance the issue is more about resources the State controls, but the key obstacle to further speed is resources in the planning system. I will be pushing and supporting my colleague, the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, in every turn to get those supports. Investing in planning resources allows us to maintain the twin objectives of getting good planning but not having a ten-year wait for everything.