Dr. Oliver Kinnane:

On the Senator's question about gas boilers, I am not sure that I am fully qualified to answer it, but I think we should be phasing them out and moving to a fabric-first approach for new buildings and retrofitting. We should be minimising the amount of auxiliary heat required and supplying that through electricity and green sources. Gas Networks Ireland has placed significant focus on the integration of hydrogen with gas, and on decarbonising the gas network. Those may be technologies that will work, but we will require a great deal of energy to create that hydrogen in the first place and to process it. We do not, as yet, have those clean energy generation capabilities in place. Not only one technology will be required in this regard, but a mix of them. I also agree with the lack of focus on the ingress of daylight and sunlight into developments. It is something we always tried to put an emphasis on in architectural schools. In practical terms, however, that aspect always falls off the table a bit. One technology which has proved to be a major success in the last decade has been light emitting diode, LED, lighting. It has reduced the energy intensity of lighting considerably. If we could do the same across other technologies-----