Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 24 March 2022

Public Accounts Committee

Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland: Financial Statements 2020

9:30 am

Photo of Brian StanleyBrian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

That is welcome. The issue is to try to get every house double glazed. Obviously, it is a good place to start.

I have another question and it relates to mass concrete housing. Your Department does not do the local authority retrofit scheme. A typical mass concrete house has 9 in. walls. There were tens of thousands of them built in the 1930s and 1940s. If they are privately owned the owner can get the 80% scheme or the 50% scheme, but the ones owned by the local authorities are the last being done. I see estates not too far from where I live that were built in the 1990s and they are being retrofitted. I saw the man in the van yesterday morning at one of them. We welcome the fact they are being done. When they were built, they were double glazed. It would not have been great quality double glazing because at that time it was skinny double glazing. They were not the most energy-efficient but they had a reasonable level of energy efficiency.

However, down the road, for example, at O'Moore Place in Portlaoise, the houses have 8 in. mass concrete walls and one would freeze in them. They are not being done. Demographically, they are low-income households, many of them with health problems, and there is no prospect of it soon. The local authorities are anxious to do it, and we have certainly been banging the drum to try to get them done. That type of house is replicated throughout the country. One sees those houses in Sligo and all over. The same design was used and in their day they were good houses. However, they would be very poor in terms of energy efficiency. Can anything be done? I understand the logic of picking the low-hanging fruit, but if houses that were built in the 2000s are being done but houses built in 1937 or 1938 are not being done, there is a huge discrepancy. What is being done to address that at Department level?

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