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

I thank Mr. Hession for his appearances morning. It is better that we are getting more than our relevant departmental information. Mr. Hession often appears before the committee but we have had the Department of housing and the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications appear before our committee also. It illustrates the fact that this is a cross-departmental problem and needs a cross-departmental approach. Do we believe the energy poverty action plan is located in the correct Department? Should it be in the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications? When we are talking about a basic underpinning of human dignity, that seems to me to sit more comfortably in the Department of Social Protection. I do not believe there can be any comparison in terms of the relative size of the Departments and the capacity of a Department to deliver multifaceted supports to people. Also, it strikes me that with the full range of levers we are talking about in the short term, medium term and long term, I see how the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications fits in on things like retrofit, whereas those short- and medium-term supports are something which come through the Department of Social Protection. Is it in the right Department?

Who is the person who gets up in the morning and asks what they are going to do today to implement the energy poverty action plan? Is somebody on this all day every day and who measures their success within their role in what they deliver on the energy poverty action plan? I believe it needs somebody who is like a dog with a bone in order to ensure we have that cross-departmental buy-in and that those separate bits come together. What forum meets on a cross-departmental basis to implement the action plan? How often does it meet? Is it high-powered enough?

Turning to the Department of housing, can it give me a picture of the building energy rating, BER, standards across the current social housing stock? Do we have those statistics? Can the Department also give me the figures for local authority retrofits over the past number of years? I am looking for whatever data the Department has in front of it, be it over the past five years or during the lifetime of this Government. Are we building capacity? Are we scaling up year-on-year the number of retrofits we are delivering? This particular scheme is within the Department of Environment, Climate and Communications, but we would all like to see the outputs on the warmth and well-being scheme, as I am sure the Department of housing would also. Has the Department a sense as to when that research is going to land in front of us and how it is going to be implemented once it arrives?