Mr. Declan Meally:

I thank the Deputy for his comments. I am delighted to be here with the committee and, as he said, it is good to see Longford represented.

On the Deputy's initial comments, as I explained, the circular economy and waste and recycling are issues for the EPA but the Deputy may recall that a number of years ago, we sponsored a national competition for communities, Get Involved, and one of the winners was the upcycling centre in Longford, which was excellent in showing what can be done with the recycling of beds and other types of furniture. It is great to see the centre go from strength to strength.

As for the backlog and the waiting list, I presume the Deputy is referring to the better energy, warmer homes scheme in particular. Within that scheme, we have had a doubling of budget this year to allow us to address the backlog. The recent changes to the scheme have seen an increase in the number of applications, but work has been ongoing, as my colleagues addressed in one of the earlier committee meetings, regarding the retrofit and the warmer homes scheme. Much of the work we have been doing has involved working with the contractors to ensure they are getting back into action given, obviously, we were impacted by the Covid over the past two years, which added to the list. In the context of the procurement we carried out, because contractors have been impacted by the price increases, we have done a lot of work within the SEAI to ensure the contractors themselves are geared up and that the maximum number of contractors are out there. We will go through reprocurements and so on as well to ensure we can bring even more of them on board. Much work has been focused specifically on that. More than half of the retrofit budget, or over €100 million, has been given towards the warmer homes scheme. It is a major focus within the organisation, from the CEO down.

The other issue relates to the numbers. We were processing 180 per month last year and have increased that to 400 a month this year in order to tackle the waiting lists. That work is ongoing.