Cormac Devlin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes, it does. I apologise to the Chairman for the delay, as I was attending another meeting. I thank the Minister for his time and it is good to talk to him again. My apologies if some of these questions have already been answered but I understand from Deputy O'Sullivan that perhaps the Minister has touched on this before. If he will excuse me I will ask the question in any event as I did not hear the answer.

On the district heating and community energy type schemes, I was with a local group in my own constituency about three weeks ago and it was looking at renewable electricity support schemes. Those who have already taken the plunge and retrofitted their homes are looking to put power back into the grid. Where are we at with this possibility at present? How far off are we with that particular initiative?

The Minister spoke of when we get to certain point that there will be many people looking to retrofit their homes and rightly so. We are near enough to that point already and the skills are not there to deal with the demand. Deputy O'Sullivan mentioned the SEAI and I too have constituents who have been waiting for an enormous amount of time to be able to draw down the fund, let alone get the work done, and this is another hurdle for them. On the SEAI and its staffing levels, additional funding has been given to it to manage this programme. Can the Minister elaborate on the SEAI's progress in respect of its recruitment?

On the practical side of getting all this rolled out, which is really important, how much co-operation is there between the Minister's own Department and, for example, the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage? We spoke about local authority housing. In my own constituency in the county council of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, the authority has done an enormous amount of work. All of the buildings are highly rated for energy efficiency. Some of the newer developments actually meet the standards for passive housing. Some of the housing is really old stock. The Minister is right about the cost-benefit analysis. It is really difficult to do one house because, for example, some in a terrace may have been purchased. We are really down to the bottom of the barrel, the expensive part, in trying to get as many of those houses as possible done. What co-operation or links exist between the Minister's Department and the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, with regard to apprenticeships? Will the Minister touch on those points?