Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. On the points the Deputy made on retrofitting, which I mentioned in response to Senator McGahon, I believe it is of great climate benefit but it is also a great strand of the proposition that we must put to our country as to why we can be part of a collective effort to get carbon emissions down. If it is part of that, we can enable homeowners to make their own homes warmer.

The Deputy asked me for my assessment of what we do at the moment. At the moment, my own sense is that the grant regime we have in place is attractive. As the Deputy knows, some of the grants are up to 50% of the cost of the retrofitting of a home. We have some low-cost loans available. Again, as the Deputy knows, there is a scheme in place for low-income and local authority homes. The homes are retrofitted and invested in by the State at no cost to the person or family living in them. In the time ahead, what we must do is build on that, and I return to the answer that I gave the Chairperson - it is about how we manage carbon taxation in the future. The next element of what must be done is to bring out the low-cost loans. I believe we are within a matter of weeks of getting that done. If one looks at the progress that we have made between 2013 and 2019, 132,000 home upgrades have been enabled by the various supports I referred to. Some 31% of those were up to a building energy rating, BER, of B2.

However, I am aware of the criticism that can be sometimes levied, namely, that a lot is done to completely retrofit a home, or to retrofit a home which is owned by a local authority, but for those anywhere in between, what is the support that can be made available? That is why I believe the lower cost loans will be important. Maybe, over time, as our carbon tax revenue continues to grow, we may need to look at the level of grant we make available and whether we need to make a level of grant available that delivers a kind of retrofitting that may be a little less than the deep retrofitting we make available but can still make a big impact on carbon emissions in the time ahead. I believe that is something Government will consider.

As for the Deputy's point on public transport projects and learnings on where we are now with the planning process, I have prioritised An Bord Pleanála from the moment I came into this office. Indeed, the board of the NDP, which I chair, met the key members of An Bord Pleanála a couple of weeks ago. The number of staff and resourcing it has is up by 40% to 50% because we need to ensure that we do two things in the future that we did not always do in the past. First, we must always have a selection of public transport projects moving through the planning process, or that have planning permission, regardless of what money is available today because, at other times when our public finances began to improve, apart from the Luas for Dublin, we were not as advanced in doing that as in retrospect we could have been. With this movement of projects through the planning process, or having projects out of the planning process, we would have public transport projects that we could give a priority to if things changed in our finances. Second, we must have a public planning process that is better resourced and we are working really hard to do that at the moment.

While the Deputy and I are always going to be careful about what we say around planning processes for any project, I am confident that when it comes to public transport and renewable energy, An Bord Pleanála will be given the resources that are needed for the evaluation of those railway orders and planning applications. I am confident that we have made big progress on that.

On the Deputy's final point on whether we are ambitious, of course, we could always do more. However, the scale of growth and capital investment in public transport both now and in the years to come is a really significant.