Mr. Conor O'Donnell:

I thank the Deputy. I have to say that Mayo County Council has done everything it can within its power. While we were on the old scheme it did very good work and I have to give Mayo County Council that. However, its hands are tied now.

Going back to SEAI, for instance, we can get a grant for €6,500 for a heat pump at the moment which is the way forward, apparently. However, I applied to the SEAI in July, and this will probably come into Senator Moynihan's question as well, under the defective concrete blocks, DCB, grant scheme and I have not even got so much as an acknowledgement, not an email or a letter, nothing. The website changes daily as to what is available.

Also, we have a huge issue with the builders. Our builders in Mayo and many rural places are small builders. They are not SEAI-qualified. To get one's boiler put in or to get one's pump or solar put in one has to go out and get a separate SEAI-registered engineer from somewhere. There are only a handful of them in Ireland and they are not prepared to come to Mayo or even to Blacksod, or Binghamstown where I live, and do that work. We cannot avail of it even if it was available. Something we were told, as the guys in Donegal have said already, would be streamlined and seamless is not. There is a huge amount of paperwork to be done but nothing is being done at the same time.

As for the costs, to begin with, we have got Mayo County Council and it is, in my opinion, doing a good job but the resources are very scanty. With regard to the foundations, for instance, I will not build a house and spend my hard-earned money on a house that has dodgy foundations. I had my foundation tested and that cost €1,700. It cost €36,000 just for demolition. If I want my builder to build the walls and then at the end of the building of the walls the builder will do a drawdown on the grant, it can take six weeks for that to come through. What is the builder supposed to do in the meantime, sit around and wait? Unless you have money to give to the builder to continue work while the grant is coming through you are stuck. The builder will have to move on to another job where they do have money. Builders are not multinationals.