Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I commend the Minister on the work he has done in the Department. He has made a real mark. We now have legislation and a framework for implementing our climate ambition. We have made significant progress and many good initiatives have been rolled out, such as the loan scheme that was recently put in place. It would be churlish not to recognise the effort, commitment and progress that the Minister has made and this is a great opportunity to do that.

We did not put the focus on energy efficiency that many other European countries did during the recent energy crisis. That was a missed opportunity to roll out a greater energy-efficiency consciousness. I am also on the enterprise committee and I know that the take-up of many of the energy-efficiency initiatives is very low. We need to put greater focus on shallow retrofits, particularly in rural Ireland, where the worst heating systems and BER standards apply. There is scope for further focus and initiative on those. I do not know exactly whether the pathfinder will be focused on those but there may be some lower hanging fruit in the energy-efficiency and shallow retrofit arena that some of the programmes are currently missing.