Mr. Brian O'Mahony:

At present, we are doing a project with Fingal County Council on this. We have done this at Harbour Road in Ballyvolane, Cork, where we worked with the local authority to do upgrades.

The Deputy is right that the challenge is the initial engagement with homeowners. As he said, there might be mixed tenure on a road or estate. The local authority may be ready to go with a deep retrofit to B2 standard involving heat pumps and replacement of windows, and to do a very good job, but the positions of the homeowners on that road will differ. The ability of private homeowners who own their own property to pay will be different, and they will be at different points in their lives with regard to their family and the ages of those in it. Their ability to complete and even do the project will be different.

We are working on that. There is no magic solution to it at present but we are trying to figure out how we can do this and replicate it. Council engagement is key in that regard. I mentioned Fingal County Council. If we go in through a project co-ordinator under our community scheme, which is how we typically do it, we need the council to also go in, along with somebody locally to open doors so that people will trust and talk to us. We see that when homeowners see the upgrades to houses on a street - on Harbour Road it was done in a number of phases - they will say that is what they want to do and will ask how they can get it done, how they can finance it and when they can do it. However, it takes a lot of time, engagement and effort from people on the ground to get that done.

This year, we are also talking to Monaghan County Council about trying to do something similar. We are open to working with any local authority to do this through our communities programme. The Deputy is dead right. Everybody on the relevant road, whether they are private homeowners or not, is in different circumstances, but when the community and council are involved, it helps to at least unlock the doors. We can then try to find the solutions to help those homeowners make the decisions.