Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I will be brief because I am sure a lot of what I have to say has been covered. There is the HAOP scheme, which is housing aid for older people. I deal with a fair number of older people with very poor houses. Before you do a BER rating, you have poor windows, poor doors and poor fabric. Before you do any insulation you have poor roofs and so on. The maximum grant, certainly in Galway, is €8,000 and there is a big demand for it. It is quicker than waiting for 20 months. Has the Department had any discussions with the Department of housing about increasing the amount of grant aid to do these basic things, and let the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications do the top-up measures that will bring these homes up to very good energy efficiency? A home might have timber doors that were fitted 40, 50, 60 or 70 years ago. I had a few houses that have applications in with the Department in the long run, but the local authority is dealing with crazy stuff in the first place. These houses are probably not measurable on the BER rating. Have there been any discussions to enable the local authorities, at least for the oldest cohort of people, to do a lot of the basic work that needs to be done on the worst of houses in our housing stock?

I see that 2,545 local authority-owned houses were upgraded under the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage local authority energy efficient retrofitting programme. Does Mr. Deegan have any idea how many houses we have in total with a BER rating below B2? Can we divide one into the other to tell us how many years it will take us to sort those houses out? Again, these are some of the poorest houses in the country because some local authority houses go back as far as the thirties. I have heard people talk about the fifties and sixties. These houses are very old and have served people very well, but they need upgrading.

There was a lot of talk about stuff in libraries and how people can save money. If people have an orderly life, of course they can. However, a lot of people we deal with have fairly chaotic lives and there are children and so on. I remember as a child being told to turn off the light. We were conscious of the cost of energy in those days. As Mr. Deegan knows, in particular when there are children around, good energy behaviour might not be so easy all of the time. We read every day in our newspapers about people who have generally disrupted lives. It is fair to say that they are unlikely to be going down to the library to learn about this, but they are probably the people in the greatest poverty. The one thing that could make a difference for them is a house with a good thermal quality.