Pauline O'Reilly (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for the contributions so far. A lot has been covered. Retrofitting is a bit of a political football. The 100% and the 80% often gets left to the side, but the majority of funding is going in to those measures around poverty reduction, in particular fuel poverty reduction. Mr. Walsh has said that. Six months ago, people would have been paying for almost 100% of the other types of retrofitting and now we are saying that the State is providing up to €25,000 of that, which is a significant increase. If we were to do as some suggest and to ensure that everybody gets it for free, do we know what the cost of that would be to the State if it was 100% free across the board for everyone?

The reality is that there is no other way to pay for that than to increase taxes. The money must come from somewhere. That means the taxpayers who are probably benefitting are also paying the tax in the first place. Nothing is free. Something has to be paid for, either through people's taxes or through somebody else's taxes. It would be useful if Mr. Walsh had costings on what it would be if it was 100% free, on top of the €8 billion. That would be useful to put it in perspective.

What is clear in the IPCC report is that it sets out what has to happen, and it must happen across all sectors. What tends to happen from a political point of view is that we say, let us not put money into electric vehicles because people who can afford EVs do not need to be supported. What I hear from Mr. Walsh, however, is that when certain things are maxed out and we are doing as much as we can in the warmer homes energy scheme based on all of the resources, we do need to still use our funding in order to try and put more things into the market that will help us to reduce our emissions. That is my understanding.

There is a cap on the grants the SEAI is providing for electric vehicles so that, as I understand it, those expensive models of cars are not getting the grant. Is it within the remit of the SEAI to look at electric bikes, for instance and to push for that? I come from a rural constituency and while it is all very well to say that people who can afford electric vehicles do not need support, that is not the case. We have 53% coverage of public transport, and we are trying to ramp that up to 70% with Connecting Ireland, but there are people who will always need cars. From what I have seen, there has been a significant reduction in the cost of lithium batteries, which has decreased the cost of electric vehicles but we still need to get more of them into the marketplace to reach our targets.