Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Yes, I am indeed. I thank the witnesses for their presentations today. They were incredibly interesting, but also very worrying, because this seems to be a real blind spot for us as a country. It does not seem like we have actually even thought about this as an issue.

Dr. Kinnane spoke about the modelling of what the embodied carbon is for the current housing and building stock. Has there been modelling done taking into account the proposals under the Housing for All plan? What will it actually mean for that? If we are looking at the embodied emissions, it seems to be, I believe, 14%. Am I correct in thinking that could be nearly 30% by the time the Government gets the Housing for All plan fully implemented? That is my first question.

My second question is on the point in Dr. Kinnane’s briefing note where he said there has been work done for the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, in relation to the performance gap between houses retrofit to near zero energy building, nZEB, and the actual performance. There seems to be quite a discrepancy between what the expectation was and what the reality is. What are the reasons for that? Why is there such a gap? It seems that 50% of fabrics are not meeting their actual design values. I am just wondering what the gaps are. Why has this happened? Has the SEAI taken those learnings and applied them to the current retrofitting plan? If the Government will be putting something like €8 billion into retrofitting and we have a very limited timeframe in which to get this done, it is incredibly important that we do it correctly and we get the emissions saving value from the money and investment that we are making. Those are my two questions.