Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I was on a building site in Cobh recently where houses were being built with a material I had never seen before. It is providing extraordinary improvements in terms of heat and energy management once the homes have been built. I think this is happening now and our job is to accelerate it further and, basically, to make it the norm. If we need to look at new incentives and new grant aid programmes to do that, then we are very open to it.

I could understand the frustration in the Senator's voice when she was making her point on the roadmaps. Until we have roadmaps that set specific targets, then it will be very hard to hold me and my Department to account in this regard. We do, of course, have targets in terms of the existing carbon-budgeting targets that we must meet by 2025 and 2030 and that are very difficult to reach. We need, though, to break this process down into roadmaps that can be delivered upon. By the way, I am more than happy to come back to the committee once we have published these two roadmaps I referred to earlier. Perhaps we can delve into them in a bit more detail then.