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

I congratulate EnergyCloud. This is an innovative initiative. From the first time I heard about it, I was taken with it. I congratulate Clúid Housing on its involvement. Why does EnergyCloud seem to be concentrating on houses delivered through schemes, whether they are run by local authorities or Clúid? There are many people in houses they own who are poor, to put it that way. There is an easy way of measuring that. The fuel allowance is given on a household basis, taking into account all household income, and, therefore, anybody getting fuel allowance is under a certain household income threshold.

I refer to hot water held in an immersion tank. No matter how bad the house is otherwise, thermally or any other way, hot water is a great boon for showering, washing, washing machines and everything else for which one uses water. Once it is a good hot water tank, it does not really affect the leakage of heat in the context of how bad the house is. What are the constraints on expanding this scheme rapidly?

I have a kind of counterpoint. For the sake of argument, let us suppose EnergyCloud manages to use all this surplus energy and heat a large number of tanks. That will deprive private commercial companies of the revenue they would have got if they had heated the tanks on a commercial basis. Is there a risk that at a certain stage of growth, there will be kick-back from the commercial companies to the effect that it was fine when it was small, but it is getting too big and that when 550,000 households are, in effect, getting a heap of preheated water during the year that we could have sold to them, this is an interference in the private market, contrary to EU rules and all sorts of mad things. I would not like to see that happening, but I am wondering is there a risk there, particularly as two State companies are involved. How can our guests guard against that or is there anything we can do to guard against it?

With regard to Irish Rural Link, the majority of houses in rural Ireland are owned. Some of them are local authority one-off houses that were built and purchased. Many of them are intergenerational houses of poor quality. For the over-65s, there is the housing aid for older people, HAOP, scheme, but the limit on that scheme is €8,000. It is not a high-technology job to realise that single-glazed windows are not much use. You do not need a BER expert to tell the householder to put in triple-glazed windows instead. The county council is quite capable of making sure that is dealt addressed. If a house has old timber doors that let in a draft underneath, it does not take a genius to put in a sealed door. There is no need for many of the complications that we seem to make out of everything nowadays. If a house has a very poor and leaking roof, or any of the other faults that appear in houses, such as cracks and everything else, that should be addressed. We seem to have endless money for retrofitting, which is great. I am glad there is no financial constraint in that regard, but the same entity, namely, the Government, has an absolute financial constraint when it comes to addressing the very simple and basic jobs that are needed by the houses of people who are in the greatest energy poverty of all. I am referring to single-glazed windows, doors that let in drafts and so on. Have the witnesses made a case for the HAOP grant to be the first port of call for works on these very poor houses just to get them into structural order so that they could then proceed to phase 2 and have the bigger things done? There would be many advantages to that. One such advantage is that the waiting list for the HAOP is far shorter than those for the retrofit or warmer homes schemes. It takes two years for a person to come out and do the survey under the warmer homes scheme. The householders might have taken 40 years to make up their mind up to ask but they want it done tomorrow. That is just the way people are. When they learn it will take two years for somebody to come out and look at it, that is a difficult ask. It puts them off getting the work done. They say they will fill in the form next week, but next week never comes.

Another advantage is that the HAOP suits the small local builders. They are already on the council list and they are dying for work. They are out there and they get it done. That will greatly improve these houses. In addition, it is easier to work it that way, as a parallel operation, than it s to get the warmer homes scheme application in. It would address the basic thermal efficiency of the houses. In my house, if the door between the house and the garage was left open, you could feel the wind coming in. When we put a spring on the door, that sorted that issue. The point is that if the wind is blowing into a house, there is no way of heating it. The first thing is to do those basic improvements. Has any thought been given to that?

A problem I come up against all the time relates to people who inherited houses. Some of them are single people who lived with their parents all their life in the old house. Some of those old houses might be 100 years old and have problems when it comes to retrofitting because they are stone houses or whatever and in very poor condition. The parents die and the person who inherits the house is in his or her 50s or whatever. There is no grant other than the retrofit grant or the warmer homes scheme available to such people. These houses need a lot more than the warmer homes scheme, and a lot more quickly. Have the witnesses been making a case that we should not have age discrimination in reverse? As a person who is at the upper end of the age profile, I often feel there is a myth that everybody under 65 has an income and is well off, while everybody over 65 is not. As a person who is on a TD's salary, I know that is not true. There are mixes of people in all age groups. Poverty does not discriminate on age grounds. Generally speaking, who is more likely to use a lot of hot water - the people who are very poor and have four kids who take showers every few hours, or the older person in reasonably good health living alone? We need to be fair to those under 66, who sometimes get left out of the narrative.

I agree with the point made in respect of credit unions. We need them in. We also need them in for the vacant home grant, which is a brilliant grant. The Croí Cónaithe scheme is really getting things done. The credit unions should come in and say they will put up a bridging loan against the grant.

Anything that one does is a risk, but the risk is small where there is property and most people who own property tend to be responsible with it.