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

The first was on rural transport. The first principle is every place matters and every person matters. This has to be inclusive. In rural areas, electric vehicles will play a much more significant role for a variety of reasons. First, they will be cheaper. If someone is doing long-distance commuting, there will be a significant advantage and benefit in being able to make the switch. EVs will also be easier to charge. In certain urban areas, where there might be a terraced row of houses or apartments, there is a difficulty in getting a plug-in home charger whereas houses in rural areas will have less difficulty in that regard. There will not be a problem with parking on the street, for example. That will play a significant role. The critical thing, as I said, is we must have alternatives in rural Ireland as well. That is why we have the connecting Ireland rural bus service reform. Further reforms in the school bus system and other rural innovations around providing shared public transport are going to be key. Furthermore, every single schoolchild and citizen should have a safe environment to allow them to walk or cycle to school. I know that is not as easy in rural Ireland as there are often roads where speeds are relatively high and footpaths are not as available or as good. However, we should not abandon rural Ireland and say children there should not have a safe route to school. That might include a review of speed limits and looking at road networks to create safe routes to schools. I do not see why we in Ireland should accept that children are not free to be able to cycle to school. We should be radical in looking at mechanisms to make it safer on our roads.

On the SEAI and the national retrofit scheme, it is, as the Senator said, ready to go. We expect to launch early in the new year. The SEAI has been given significantly increased resources. It has got an additional 70 staff, I think, this year and another 50 planned for next year.

Central to making the scheme take off will be the one-stop-shop approach and the new loan facilities. The Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland will provide a guarantee for the first quarter of a loan for retrofitting. The work that these loans cover is not cheap, going from €20,000 to €60,000 in some cases. We have to bring the costs down to make the numbers add up. One way to do that is to guarantee the first quarter of the loan, which effectively lowers the risk of a default on that loan or on a portfolio of loans. That allows other banks to come in and lend some of the remaining loans that are needed at a much lower interest rate. We think that we can almost halve the market interest rates while still involving participants. There is a figure of €125 million for investment in the climate action plan, the vast majority of which is private investment, which we need. The scale of change will require the €35 billion in transport investment and €12.9 billion in the national development plan for climate, which is mostly retrofitting-related. Even with that, we will need further private financing for private houses and commercial businesses.

I met the vice president of the European Central Bank the week before last. The ECB is interested in providing loans that will allow schools, hospitals and local community health centres to retrofit their buildings. The savings that will come from the energy efficiency measures will pay for the loans. They are attractive because-----