Mr. Robert Deegan:

In terms of when the loan guarantee scheme will become available and what it is about, the Government is working with the Department of Finance, the European Investment Bank, EIB, and the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, SBCI, to put in place a loan guarantee scheme that will reduce the risk for financial institutions to give out loans for retrofit projects which will, in turn, reduce the interest rate that homeowners must pay and make retrofitting more affordable. The scheme is under development and meetings are ongoing. In fact, an EIB delegation came here to attend meetings yesterday and today.

In the coming weeks we will reach the very important milestone of a pre-qualification call whereby financial institutions express an interest in it, give a high-level overview of it and narrow the field a little in terms of the number of financial institutions so we will know how many people are interested, and we can get data from them that will inform the loan guarantee model.

When will the scheme be available on the market? We are aiming for quarter 3 of this year. We think it is going to be a very important initiative for the people who draw down partial grants. We fully accept that the grant schemes are very generous by international standards but if one is doing a very deep retrofit there is still a big financial impediment and an upfront cost barrier. We believe that in future people will supplement a partial grant with some of their savings, and for those who need extra from the loans then they will be available through financial institutions like banks and credit unions.