Mr. Jim Gannon:

The three core actions for us are to make sure that communities and citizens are aware of what is coming, to inform them to give them the power to interact with that and empower them by creating the type of systems and mechanisms I spoke of earlier.

We have a White Paper that places the energy citizen at the core of what we are doing. There is a principle established that we must embody in what we do year on year. It is important that we bring them early into the policy dialogue in order that their point of interaction is not when they first interact with infrastructure or smaller scale technology. The Department has opened up a dialogue on the clean energy package quite early. There might be only a small level of interaction at the start but if we keep people informed and abreast of developments, it embeds not necessarily acceptance but awareness. I have mentioned a couple of the programmes we have under way to inform people. All of our touch points, including performing 90,000 building energy ratings per year and interacting individually with 22,000 homeowners who upgraded their homes last year through our programmes, should be a method by which we can engage them in this sort of debate and inform them of what might come next. Specific projects are important too where we can say here is some best practice but along with that, here are the seven lessons learned, here is where it went wrong. For example, we need to move from a shallow retrofit of our housing stock to a deeper retrofit, analogous to what Mr. O'Shea described. As we do that we need to bring people along, we deal with houses, treating the different types of technology they could use and their costs. We need to make sure people are aware from the outset and that we use transparent analyses to bring them along. It is a question of transparency and making people part of the dialogue.