Dr. Ciaran Byrne:

I thank the Cathaoirleach. I will give a high-level response. The Cathaoirleach rightly alluded to the fact that we have a research section that has done some research. The leaflet suggestion is great and we will take it back to the ranch. That is something we can do. We have a lot of what we call assets in terms of advertising and our "reduce your use" campaign and things like that. A lot of that work has probably been done.

The Cathaoirleach made an important point, which I take, about the frustrating part of the warmer homes scheme being the surveys. People wait for so long and then someone turns up and tells them that the computer says no, etc. We are going to expedite surveys. We are in the process of tendering again for a managing agent to do that survey work for us and one of the criteria will be to increase capacity for surveying. The quicker customers get through the funnel the sooner they will know if they are on or off, and what their options are.

The Cathaoirleach made a valid point. We know that contractors want efficiency. They want to be able to aggregate because they are business people. If they can set up and do an entire street or half a street, that is obviously the thing to do. We are looking at the waiting lists, slicing and dicing, and considering if we can get back to people. The costs of the scheme have increased year upon year. We have been pushing towards deeper and deeper measures. Those deeper measures take longer because they are more complex, ergo there is less output in terms of numbers. We are trying to look at that and consider if we can do something different. That means going back into our supply chain and retooling it, which takes quite a bit of work.

The Cathaoirleach referred to attics and bottlenecks. I understand that a charity was set up in England to help people to clear their attics because that is one of the bottlenecks. If you go into anybody's attic, you can look at where the Christmas tree is and all that kind of stuff.

That is what are you dealing with to a degree.

On the research looking at mould and health, I fully endorse what was said. Although they are intangible and therefore harder to quantify, I would postulate that the health benefits are worth more than the monetary savings on energy costs. Warmth and well-being, which will be published in quarter 1 this year, demonstrates that to a degree. There are other studies, particularly in the UK, which is somewhat analogous to us in housing stock and climate. They all say the same thing about the unit cost - if you put a pound into a retrofit, you get X, Y, Z out. They are much harder to tabulate because they are much more dispersed but there is a growing body of evidence that the health benefits are worth more than the financial savings and fuel costs. That leads back to the medical costs for retrofitting.

On the building and older homes scene, we can ask our research team to have a look. All you have to do is knock around some of the older housing estates in some suburban areas and they are full of people whose kids have fled the nest and who are in bigger homes than they need. That is probably more a matter of housing policy but it is something we can look at under energy efficiency, where people are either under-heating or over-heating. In some cases, they are heating where they do not need to and in others heating only one room of a bigger house, which comes into energy efficiency. On the grant levels and the retrofit grant, the Cathaoirleach hit the nail on the head. My example gave the grant available to that homeowner but in some cases not all measures were taken up. The year 2022 was an extraordinary one for building inflation. I think average inflation went up by around 16% in construction. Within that, certain materials went up considerably more. A concern we have about putting grant levels back up is that we become the reason for inflation. If you put the grant levels back up, the price will go back up. There is a sensitivity around how to turn those dials around and getting the grant levels more aligned without us driving inflation. As public representatives, members have heard that. People come say, "If you put €1,000 grant on that, the price goes up the following day by €1,000". You have to be careful to counter that.

On the last point about the 500,000 homes, right now, more than 50% of funding is available for the energy-poor, fuel-poor section of the warmer homes scheme. We have the profile up to 2030. I cannot comment on policy. We are doing what we are asked to. The building performance directive is coming along, which will force us to change and look at what we are doing because it asks us to look at the worst-performing homes to bring them to the minimum energy performance standard. While we do that under the warmer homes scheme at the moment, it is likely we will look at the implication on all our schemes. We will have to lean it towards the worst-performing homes to get the best bang for our buck. It would be fair to say, and I think the Department would agree, that what we are doing now is not necessarily what we will be doing in 2030. We have to evolve and move with the times. We will find cohorts of homes that are doing very well and cohorts that are particularly difficult to treat, for which different options will be required. We are open, as is the Department, to looking at all options available.