Marc Ó Cathasaigh (Waterford, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Very good. When I am thinking about the green and digital transitions, I think of the words of William Gibson, which I have used here before. He said: "The future is already here – it's just not very evenly distributed". That is very true and retrofit is a good example of it. I know the many programmes outlined by the witnesses are very welcome but it will take a long time before the retrofit programme reaches everybody. I often think of the people who are wealthy enough to afford to have their home retrofitted with electric panels on the roof and who drive an electric car charged off those panels. They are already living in this future but there are a lot of people who are living in very poor quality social housing possibly from the 1930s and 1950s - whatever era it was built in. We got some interesting figures on the breakdown of the performance rating of those homes.

In the immediate term, the lever we could use in the shortest possible timeframe was money and we made energy credits available. That was the correct response. I have some distributional questions around those. In the long term, we want to retrofit every property in the land so that everyone is living in a B1-rated property or higher. Are there medium-term measures in place? I worry about people being left behind? What I want is for people to feel that the energy transition is working for them. When I think about medium-term measures, I think about what EnergyCloud is doing. We have a curtailment on our electricity because it is windy so let us dump it into some cylinders. I am thinking about solar panels on social homes because a deep retrofit is a pain, whereas fitting insulation and solar panels is quick and easy and give people the benefit of the transition. I am thinking about what the Austrians did in funding two energy-efficient appliances for social homes on the basis that the residents probably had a bad, energy-intensive washing machine that was not doing a great job. It decided that those residents would get a little bit of the benefit of the energy transition by funding some energy-efficient appliances.

I understand energy credits on the short-term lever. Long term, we are going for deep retrofit across our housing stock but that is a 20-year project. What are we going to do in the middle period to make sure people are getting the benefit from the transition?