Mr. Declan Meally:

Yes. The energy companies themselves have an obligation to work with the public sector and businesses to find energy efficiencies and savings within those organisations. There are also energy service companies. We have a list of auditors, practitioners, advisors and organisations and, across the public sector, we are developing energy bureaus to develop expertise within those organisations to build internal capacity and help them understand what they need to do. We have seen an exemplar in the HSE with its decarbonisation roadmap. The Department of Education has also published such a roadmap. These are all showing a lead and a route forward towards reaching their targets.

On the business side, to go back to Senator Garvey's questions, we collaborate on the climate toolkit. We fed into that. We are signposting that these are not additional services and that we are all within the umbrella of the climate toolkit through the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. We are using networks such as the Irish Hotels Federation, IBEC and the Small Firms Association to make sure the message is getting out there. Deputy Bruton is right that more activity could be happening but we are channelling our efforts through every channel available to us and making sure that businesses are aware of supports and that the system is as easy to access as possible because businesses being time poor can be an issue in keeping activity going.

The opportunities we are seeing through the audits is that businesses can see up to 70% savings opportunities in some areas and it is at least pointing them to where they can achieve the savings. In many cases, they could achieve up to 30% savings by just changing behaviours and switching things off, so it is actually low cost and no cost opportunities. These are the measures we are making as case studies and then publishing to others in their sectors so they can see what they can do.