Mr. John O'Sullivan:

In fact, in 2024 we are supporting stand-alone measures for 300 projects across its full portfolio. Typically, these would be energy-efficiency, low-cost, high-impact types of measures. For a number of years, we have typically been supporting between 200 and 300 projects annually. We have been on this journey. Mr. Meally mentioned a few times our bid in respect of the infrastructure, climate and nature fund. We have been going through a process of strategic assessment and preliminary business case activity to determine the right policy measures and the right way to deliver funding. We have put in a bid for €1.25 billion. We have concluded that we are much better off investing that money in energy-efficiency type measures than in deep retrofits initially. That is not saying we are not doing anything in the deep retrofit space, but the quickest way to achieve progress towards our emissions reductions target is in the easy-to-get, low-cost and high-impact measures. We have just started this work to develop a scheme we are calling retrocommissioning. It will be one that will package together in a structured way a mix of light to standard types of retrofit up to a certain level. Additionally, this approach will be mixed with energy decarbonisation. By that, I refer to situations where fossil-fuel boilers might be being removed and a renewable alternative installed. Typically, this would be a heat pump, biomass or some other biofuel solution. We are going to roll this approach out and this is where we are going to see a great deal of uptake in the public sector for sure. This is because we will be dealing not with ten or 20 buildings, but probably more likely with 500 or 1,000 buildings, or even beyond that figure, very quickly.

The HSE project itself was a long time in development. The body is developing its climate action decarbonisation roadmap. Our targets are split into energy decarbonisation, namely, emissions reduction, and energy reduction. It is also necessary to achieve the 1.9% energy consumption reduction per year. We are coming at the issue from the two sides. The intent of this specific programme was firstly to identify ten buildings representative of the entire HSE estate. The organisation went through a process and selected four acute hospitals, four community nursing units or local hospitals and two administration buildings. Queuing in behind that activity, and the HSE is already working on this aspect, are the next 24 buildings, while after that are another 100 buildings.

Within its decarbonisation roadmap, those 10, 24 and 100 are mapped out in order to best achieve the emissions reduction target.