Ms Orla Coyle:

We have a scheme under which we have a research and development call every year. We work with various Departments, including the Departments of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Environment, Climate and Communications to identify projects that we want to research. This particular call was around the operational performance of these buildings. That study looked at a very small sample in terms of the fabric. As part of that call, a request was made for more funding to do bigger research projects. We recently issued the call for this year's funding. We seek this information in order that we can ask the right questions. We want these buildings to perform. We feed in the research information.

Another comment that was made was around the performance of heat pumps. We have learned from that research and fed it into our grant schemes, in that we make the contractors do correct designs in terms of their buildings. Part of that study was around the weather data that are used for determining the performance of the heat pumps. We adjust the performance of the heat pump based on Irish weather data in the BER system. We have already implemented some of that study and we are either working on or doing additional research on other parts of it and feeding that in to the methodologies and calculations.