Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

In regard to subhead B4 on the retrofit programme, everyone is waiting to hear and really hoping for an ambitious programme to be announced this afternoon, and I know there may be some instances where the Minister of State cannot go into much detail. I wonder about the low-cost loans scheme. One of the risks is that there will be a significant number of people who will not be in a position to take out a loan upfront in order to do retrofitting and those people may not be eligible for something like the warmer homes scheme. Has the Department done an analysis on the number of households that will fall into that financing gap and what will be available for them?

The next point follows on from Deputy O'Rourke’s point on the figures. If we look at the figure of 19,400, that is not necessarily to the rating of B2, and this is specified and brought out in more detail in the third point, which states that 8,640 will be to a B2 level. The programme for Government and the Government commitment is for 500,000 at B2 level. Is it the case that out of that 500,000, only 8,640 have actually been upgraded to B2 level so far? That would leave 491,000 houses that still have to be brought up to that B2 level.