Mr. Brian O'Mahony:

I was not directly involved in that study on the hub. My understanding is focused not on the energy-poor sector but those heating controls are still eligible for support today. I refer to the better energy homes and the individual measures. Home owners can do just one measure if they wish. That is really important. We are still focusing on that. We are also pivoting our programmes to look to the future.

Regarding those shallow measures, there has been discussion today about cavity and attic insulation and heating controls. I will take the example of attic and cavity insulation. If you take a typical terrace or end of terrace home that needs an upgrade for attic and cavity, it would cost in the range of about €2,500 to €3000 to do both of those measures. The grant is about €2,000 to €2,500, depending on the house type. Often somebody needs to find up to €1,000 and that can be a challenge for some people at the moment. We recognise that. We do not have the loan scheme in place but if you go to the credit union and borrow €500 at 7% to do one measure, over one year it would cost about €43 per month to pay for that upgrade. However, the energy savings you would see this winter and next winter would be about half of that. You would get about €25 to €40 per month benefit. There are options available for people. We recognise that and we need to respond and help them. That is why when you look at the individual measure scheme or the better energy homes, you will see the supports are much higher for those shallow measures. We are still trying to support that sector. As my colleague, Mr. Randles, mentioned, we have seen almost a tripling of the activity in that sector. That sector has grown tremendously this year and we expect that next year, it will grow tremendously as well. However, we need to be realistic. The sector is not going to grow by ten times overnight. It will take a couple of months to get there but we are growing and we are on that pathway to grow for both the shallow measures and the deeper measures.