Mr. Seamus Boland:

I thank Senator Ward. The word "transition" is key, and it has been applied in the midlands in respect of a range of programmes. We would again look at an evaluation of how that is working. It is a subject for another debate, but we have major questions around whether we really mean transition and what do we mean by transition, because we do not know if it is reaching all the rural households.

To be clear, we must not forget one-off houses. There are thousands and thousands of such houses. We believe there are solutions. We are still awaiting the roll-out of the farm sheds thing, which basically involves putting solar panels on farm sheds. We would solve a great deal of the heating and domestic heating, not to mention power and electricity, of farms if we could get that rolled out. We still have not managed to get that out yet. There are solutions for the households in many of the rural areas that we need to start rolling out. We need to treat it as an emergency. We did so and have been praised worldwide that when we have to deal with an emergency, we deal with it. There is an emergency in rural areas, especially around one-off houses. That emergency needs to be dealt with. There are solutions in the context of solar power, even wind power or whatever, but we need to get them into the discussions, into real schemes and programmes and then we need to implement them. We seem to be coming up with ideas, stop-starting and then not doing them or doing them very locally and not doing them somewhere else, doing different schemes in different counties and all of that. It is about a little bit more cohesion and co-ordination.