Mr. Robert Deegan:

I will take the supply chain question first if that is okay. The national retrofit plan was published in 2021. It identified supply chain skills and standards as one of the four pillars. The pillars were supply chain skills and standards, financing and funding, driving demand and activity and governance and structures. There has been a real focus on supply chain skills and standards and I am happy to report there has been some good progress on that also. To go back to first principles, the first thing we had to do was quantify the problem. We actively participated in the expert group on future skills needs that both quantified the overall number of people needed to hit our retrofit targets and broke it up into the various skill types and skill sets. That report, which was a really comprehensive piece of work, was then handed over to the Department of further and higher education, primarily, and SOLAS, which have been putting a major focus on the retrofitting and near-zero energy building, NZEB, agenda in recent years. The focus has mainly been on two strands, namely, apprenticeships for the long term and upskilling and reskilling for the near term. To give some tangible examples of what has happened, in that period we have gone from having no centres of excellence for retrofitting at NZEB to six around the country as part of the ETBs. Last year, there were more than 4,000 participants on those upskilling and reskilling courses. That is a 100% increase on the previous year and from much lower numbers in years previous to that, so there has been a really concerted effort by our colleagues in the Department of further and higher education and I put on record our appreciation for that because it really has made a difference. There are also flexible online courses. They have got what they call a retrofit rig, which is a mobile retrofit training facility that can go around to not just other ETBs but also to schools. We need to develop the pipeline of young people entering the sector for the future because in the past, there has probably been a focus at secondary school on college and university as the be-all and end-all. Now, the Minister, Deputy Ryan, has been very focused on the green economy and how these are the jobs of the future. On retrofit alone, this is a 30-year programme of work. We are going to do 500,000 houses to 2030. There are another 1.5 million-odd houses that need to be retrofitted in the years after that and then the cycle begins again. For any young people out there, there are the jobs that are going to be well paid. There is an €8.26 billion budget to 2030 to fund this.

Turning to what we in the Department have been doing to support the supply chain, we first secured an NDP allocation of €8 billion and European regional development funding of €264 million. That is not just in place as a big bundle of funding as we have broken it down on a year-by-year basis. That gives certainty to the sector to grow and there is a financial commitment there. When we spoke to the supply chain we were told what was really needed was a commitment the funding was going to be there. We also changed the schemes so they were year-round. In the past the schemes were stop-and-start, so what was happening was people were taking on staff and then having to let them go during the winter because the schemes would take applications for the first quarter, do the work in the second and third quarters and then there would be nothing to be done in the fourth quarter, meaning it was always going up and down. Now the schemes run all year round. There is a pipeline being driven by the fact there is a financial commitment there and that gives the supply chain the capacity to grow and expand.