Mr. Brian O'Mahony:

For the traditional homes it is an issue. In Ireland there are many homes constructed with traditional types of materials such as solid block or brick, which was mentioned, or clay. These use lime-based mortar. They actually perform differently from modern construction that uses typically concrete. Basically they use their thermal mass to heat up and cool down and use moisture moving through them differently. Modern insulation is not a suitable product for these houses. In the grant schemes we would require all of the products that are installed to meet the building regulations part D, which are around materials and workmanship. Many of the products that could be used in traditional buildings would not meet these requirements or there are arguments for certification. In the past two years the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the National Standards Authority of Ireland, NSAI, have been working on guidance for traditional homes. Just before the end of last year they published this guidance. We have since been working with Department Housing, Local Government and Heritage and the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications in developing a pilot to deploy this guidance into our schemes. Hopefully once that is agreed we will deploy it later this year so we can ensure that the installer base and the people doing these installations understand how to deploy and deliver these in the proper way. I would expect movement on that in 2024 and this would then be a solution for these traditional homes.

The second question was on costs. On the individual energy upgrade scheme we do still have a 50% uplift for wall insulation, solar thermal and other measures. We do not have it for attic cavity and heating controls because those grants were increased in early 2022. On the one-stop-shop services and deeper retrofit we have a standard offering across the country. We found that this seemed to work very well with communities and with the one-stop-shops. The island communities came to us last year and asked us to look at this in a lot more detail. We have looked in detail at the cost of delivery to the islands and the Deputy is correct. We have a third-party quantity surveyor to look at this for us and we are seeing that the cost varies across the offshore islands in Ireland from an additional 7% to 30% loading, as the Deputy mentioned, to actually deliver the upgrades. We are considering this at the moment and we are going back in more detail to look at what is happening in these islands and the challenges they are facing so we can make a recommendation to the Department about whether there should be a change to the offering we give as well.