Professor Lisa Ryan:

I wish to elaborate on what Ms King suggested. It is really talking about the level of investment that will be required. More modelling certainly needs to be done on the macroeconomic impacts.

We are talking of a figure of €50 billion and how that is split. For example, in the power sector, we are talking about €30 billion. There is a question regarding competitiveness. What we really need to think about is capturing a lot of that value chain domestically. Ms King spoke about producing heat pumps in Ireland. We can look at employment numbers we have so far. A total of 15,500 people are involved in the sale of auto fuels. What are those people going to do? A total of 15,500 people are employed in metals manufacturing. We know that about €25 billion needs to be spent on wind. A good portion of that will be spent on wind turbines. Consoles must be manufactured here but €6 billion will be spent on the construction of those wind turbines. I am elaborating on Ms King's point. We need to split and do a lot more modelling on the capital investment and some of the labour investment. In particular, we need to watch the construction sector very carefully because it is already very tight. We have targets for building new houses, deep retrofits and shallow retrofits. Some of those investments are going to be on labour while others will be on the actual technology going into that housing.

Regarding spatial awareness, particularly in the residential sector, we know that more than half of D-rated properties on the building energy ratings register in Ireland are to the west of the country. Most A and B-rated properties are around the Dublin area. If we are talking about retrofitting, we are going to end up focusing on rural Ireland so many of the construction jobs will be scattered geographically. These are important points to think about as we get into implementation. We need to make sure our investment is spread.

I am getting into another area here in asking who is going to pay for this. How much will be public cost and how much will be private? A lot of work needs to be done in this area and we would be happy to contribute to that at some time in the future.