Mr. Paul Kenny:

I will try to take the questions from the beginning. The first question concerned the difficulty in accessing grants and one-stop shops. Those questions can be blended. Some of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland, SEAI, grants are extremely easy to access. The problem is getting someone to do the work and being assured that he or she will do a good job. There must be competence and capacity in the market. We have very unregulated plumbing, insulation and construction industries. That is the challenge. Several years ago we ran a scheme funded by the SEAI. It was pushing the idea of grouped access to grants. We offered a single figure for three-bedroom semi-detached houses. All the homeowner needed to do was sign and we organised everything else. People contacted us and said the only reason they were doing it was that it was really easy. Otherwise they could not be bothered. It was the same grant, but streamlining it to make it very easy made the difference.

That is what the Tipperary Energy Agency has aimed to do. We are a social enterprise, governed and set up by the local authority. We act on behalf of the local authorities in Tipperary and surrounding counties. It is a model that could work very well. It works well across Europe. It has been under severe pressure. There were a lot more energy agencies in the early 2000s. A lot of them disappeared due to the financial crisis. Our business model is under pressure to deliver. That is a very good thing. It means we have to be lean and that kilowatt-hours are important. The energy efficiency obligation scheme, which applies to energy suppliers, is part of the funding model. An undertaking that is internal to a local authority and is not subject to the stick of having to deliver would not be a good idea. How to make one-stop shops work is pretty well known across Europe. Our model has been very effective in Tipperary. That is partly because of the support of the local authority and partly because we have had some brilliant staff over the years. It works, although a little bit of funding might be needed to get it up and running, perhaps in the form of programme-based funding for people to get energy advice as a paid-for service whereby one gets X hundred euro per energy advice.

We wrote a proposal for the Department several months ago. It was submitted to the Joint Committee on Climate Action. I am happy to send that to this committee's members as well. It would not be very expensive to do. This is what I mean by market development. The State is focused too heavily on grants without spending more money on training. The reason the training is not working is not because of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government or the SEAI. A different Department, which has not been engaged, holds responsibility here. There are no apprenticeships in plumbing. Nothing is happening in the area of training and capacity-building. It is very hard to hold the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government or the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment responsible for something that is a different Department's responsibility.

That dovetails very neatly with the question of market capacity and new homes. The biggest concern of the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government, as Mr. Armstrong will allude to, is what would happen if we installed 30,000 heat pumps next year and nobody has a clue what they are doing. We would have a serious problem then. I share Mr. Armstrong's concern. We have all talked about this concern for the last seven years. It is still a concern because we have done nothing about it. We need to fix that problem urgently so that in three years' time we do not find we are unable to mandate it because the market does not have the capacity to deliver it. We have just completed a research project on the optimisation of homes for air source heat pumps with Limerick Institute of Technology, ESB Networks and Electric Ireland. It is not very hard to do but it has to be done. There are a couple of steps. Heat pumps need to be designed and installed properly. It is not rocket science. All heating in Sweden is now either from district heating or heat pumps. Sweden has phased out fossil fuel boilers. It is used across the board in Japan and Australia. There are lots of places that do not use fossil fuel boilers for domestic heat. It is a question of having the right skills, regulation and continuous professional development for plumbers and so on.

The last question concerned finance. We have a scheme for SMEs which consists of the Department of Finance and the European Investment Bank, EIB, de-risking money and it is run through the pillar banks. Exactly the same model could apply here. It is being rolled out in several European countries. Discussions are being held with various officials across the board. Everyone is aware of what needs to be done. It is a question of delivering it. The State can borrow at a fraction of the cost of other borrowers. If a homeowner is offered a payback over ten years, an interest rate of 8% or 9% on the loan removes the payback. It becomes very costly. If the interest rate is 2% it is a totally different game.

The opportunity is very clear. While the necessary steps are hard work, they are not rocket science. As a State we have overcome much more challenging things. These things need to be put in place urgently. The people in the background know all of these solutions but ultimately there are not enough people in the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government and the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment to get all of these things done. Unless the Civil Service has the capacity to deliver the changes, we will be sitting here with a long list of things to do and no-one to deliver them. The biggest barrier in Ireland for the last five years has been a lack of civil servants. That is visible not just in this Department but across the board. We need to build the capacity so the Civil Service can deliver those programmes.