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

The Cathaoirleach has changed my plan for how I am going to direct my questions, but he is the boss. I acknowledge the fantastic work that both of the organisations do. I will direct most of my questions to people from EnergyCloud Ireland. I might come back to Mr. Boland afterwards. I know Senator Garvey will be anxious to interrogate his work. I very much agree with what he said about credit unions. I would like to see those low-cost loans working through the credit unions, essentially as community-owned banks, which is what they are in a de facto sense. We should be moving to that more public banking model. My understanding is that we are going to see those low-cost loans at the end of March but I would like to see the credit unions involved. I also want to ask some questions about transport deprivation as well, when we get to it.

I am a great admirer of EnergyCloud Ireland's work. I spoke last week about how we tackle fuel poverty and how we build that into the energy transition must be a short-, medium- and long-term project.

In the short term, we have done money transfers. That can be done instantly, and that was the correct way to proceed in the very immediate term. In the long term, we should be doing that deep retrofitting of properties that Mr. Boland was talking about. What I really like about this project is that it deals with the medium term. It does not take a long time or a lot of money and what I really like about it is that it gives some benefits to people who are, in so many other ways, quite distant from the benefits that our society gets from the transition to a new model, such that they actually feel that the energy transition is working for them.

I ask our guests to describe the installation process. A deep retrofit of a home is expensive, takes a long time and is an absolute pain in the butt. I ask our guests to describe the process whereby they fit the device into cylinders, the type of information they get back and what we can learn from that. As I understand it, there are quite a number of safeguards around that information so that should not be something for people to worry about but we can learn a huge amount from the data. I would like to hear from Ms McDonnell about what those who are benefiting from this think about it, particularly what it does in terms of changing their energy use habits and the awareness that people have around that.