Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I will take some of those questions and also bring in my colleague, Mr. O'Mahony. Regarding a low-interest rate loan, I cannot specify a rate at present but what we are talking about is a significant discount to that available in the current market. There are figures being kicked around and I have seen them, but it is not appropriate for me to mention a figure because nothing is validated as yet. However, it is considered to be at a significant discount to the rates available in the current market from the pillar institutions.

I will ask Mr. O'Mahony to comment on the attic and cavity question. In terms of estate by estate, that is exactly the principle of what we are doing. The Deputy spoke about aggregation. When one speaks to a contractor, the contractor wants to make business efficient for it, so it has to go into an estate and rather than going to number 1, number 7 and number 13 and then trying to find another couple of customers, the contractor wants to build the schemes and link them in a way whereby they go through the estate. From the customer's point of view, one does the whole lot. The other piece is where people get their information. They trust scientists and certain places. They trust their community organisations, the sustainable energy communities, SECs, and community-based marketing. Some of the community-based marketing that will happen through the SECs will link the one-stop shops to those types of estates, but we are making sure the structures are in place and the schemes are developed in a way that they can do that. In other words, what we are about is retrofitting homes, and how they are paid for and who pays for them is nearly a secondary consideration. Once we retrofit the homes we get the carbon emissions down, and it is to make it as efficient as possible to do that work.

Regarding the acceleration of the solar scheme, we believe there is capacity to accelerate that scheme. It is going particularly well at present. We have seen almost a trebling of applications in the scheme between January and March. Obviously, the current crisis has improved that even further and we believe there is potential to scale that. However, we have to be careful. It was a €10 million to €12 million business last year so within that one has to be careful. One can scale it to a point, but one does not want to scale it to a point where one breaks it.

We have commenced our engagement with the local authorities on the retrofit package. They have been doing retrofit, we have been doing retrofit and we have had the midlands pilot scheme. We have engaged again in talking about the aggregation piece. Certainly, the vacant homes is an area that we can look at with them in terms of how we join up. Again, it goes back to the end point, which is about ensuring that we retrofit as much as possible to reduce emissions.

To some extent, we nearly have to supersede, insofar as we can, various silos, budgets and thought processes where we do our bit and you do your bit. We have commenced that engagement with the local authorities. Looking at the so-called low-hanging fruit, the vacant homes could be a very useful discussion.

I will ask my colleague, Mr. O'Mahony, to comment on the potential number of cavity-insulated walls out there.