Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein)
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I thank everybody for their contributions. It is important, as others have said, that we are discussing energy poverty around climate action as well.

It is a real blind spot for many policymakers and even media to draw the parallels between the two in that if we are not reducing our emissions and our energy poverty, we are just transferring wealth. That might have been in Social Justice Ireland's opening statement.

I would like to focus first on looking at how we measure when we are taking climate action, particularly in respect of retrofitting and renewable energy, and ensuring we are capturing what the impact is on reducing energy poverty as well. The Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform report from 2018 highlighted the fact that we do not have those data and, therefore, when homes are retrofitted, unless they are covered under the warmer homes schemes, household income data or the energy used by those availing of the grants is not being captured. I would like to hear the views of all the witnesses as to how important it is that we start collecting the data around household income and energy poverty levels when we are giving such large amounts of public money to retrofit.

Another thing I wish to focus on, which I think Ms O'Connor touched on, is the Danish model and heat pumps. Maybe the witnesses can send on more information as to how different jurisdictions are doing that.

The other point is about switching suppliers. There has been lots of talk about the CRU needing to monitor self-disconnection and to have greater transparency and greater information for us all in this area. However, one of the issues that was flagged in the old energy poverty report was the barriers to people switching, whether it is that older people do not like direct debits or whether it is the capacity to spend, or even just having the time to spend, hours on a phone dealing with a supplier to switch. Are there any recommendations there that we need the regulator to look at to make it much easier for people to switch, while also identifying those barriers and how we can help those people to switch supplier? While there is not much value in switching in the market now, we know that will change and it is an important way for people to reduce their bills.