Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

To start, I wish to pass on my condolences for Mr. Paul Kelly, his family, friends and colleagues. This is very sad news.

I have a couple of questions. Some of them follow on from Deputy Ó Cuív's questions. I will give two examples. In one, a constituent of mine contacted me regarding his mother, who was on pay-as-you-go tariffs for both electricity and gas. When he did an analysis of what his mother was paying, he discovered that she was paying 14% more for electricity and 20% more for gas. He then decided this needed to be checked out. It is an older bungalow-type house. They went and applied for the grant. They are now caught between a rock and a hard place because he applied for the grant 20 or 24 months ago. I thought it was 24 but I am now hearing it is 20. There are a lot of people who are paying substantially more for their electricity and gas than if they paid on a monthly basis rather than on a pay-as-you-go basis. I would like to query the pay-as-you-go system. What can we do to bring down costs for people because we are talking about the most vulnerable? Those on pay-as-you-go tariffs are people on social protection payments or pensions. The most vulnerable people are paying the most. They are paying substantially more than people who can, in some ways, afford to pay a little bit more. That needs to be addressed.

How can we speed up the retrofitting of the houses of those people who are the most vulnerable? If I have the money or cash and apply for the grant as a private house owner, I will get a certain amount of money off. There is a difference in the timelines for that and for 100% grants, that is, grants that pay for the work entirely. Do we know the difference between those timelines? What is the difference in the timeline for a private person paying for the work?

I am hearing that there are contractors who wait until they have a number of houses or units in a particular area before going in to do the work. They may have 100 houses. They wait until they have a certain number of houses. Is that correct? That is certainly what I have been hearing.

On the "renovictions", I recently came across the case of an apartment block that was renovated by the landlord. This was a substantial number of apartments. When the renovations were finished and the outside of the building had been retrofitted, the rent went from €1,146 per month to €2,450 per month. When we went through Threshold, it was agreed that this was a substantial renovation and that increase was allowed. We have an issue where private landlords are substantially renovating properties. Although this was not a renoviction as the people are still in situ, because the landlord had substantially renovated the property by retrofitting the outside of the building, the rent was doubled. I am worried about that. When we are talking about giving landlords a substantial amount of money from public funds, we need to lock in those landlords to make sure they do not substantially increase the rents. For me, a ten-year lease is a long-term lease. This is public money going into the hands of private landlords. We have to be really careful that we do not enable people to flip these houses and get an extra €40,000 or €50,000 because they are up to the top level of the standards. I am very worried and concerned about that. Renovictions and renovations leading to increased rents are of great concern.