Mr. Seamus Hoyne:

I might comment on the public building aspect. It is a really good question. There are two points to make. Not all public buildings are traditional. There is a great deal of work ongoing. I was involved in a study, which was completed last year, looking at the cost of bringing public buildings across all sectors of the State to a B2 energy rating. That brings us back to our data question. It was incredibly difficult to gather data on the quantum, size and energy consumption of our public buildings. This included schools, hospitals, etc. There was differing availability of data. It was an incredible challenge to gather the data.

There are some leading areas in the context of public buildings. The HSE has a very ambitious plan in terms of retrofitting and upgrading buildings. It has done significant work on energy conservation and energy management and the next scale is decarbonisation of its buildings, which vary from large hospitals right down to smaller medical centres.

We are working with the Department of Education at the moment. We are doing benchmarking and energy assessments of more than 500 schools in the south east.

We have good data on the location of all the schools and the quantum of students. However, the energy performance data is patchy across their building stock. That data set will inform their investment plan for the next ten years. Dr. Engle Purcell mentioned the local authorities. Certainly in Tipperary, we have done a huge decarbonisation agenda for public buildings including swimming pools, local authority and municipal district offices. There are examples of really good work for traditional and non-traditional buildings or standard buildings. It is happening and in some cases ad hoc. We are not telling enough people about it and sharing the data. It returns to the point: do the assessment, do the project, share the knowledge as much as possible and collate the data so that we can do it bigger, better and faster the next time.