Pat Rabbitte (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It will be out in quarter three for a reasonable period. I do not know the figure the Deputy would put on it and I am quite agreeable to agreeing something with her on it. The scheme was promised for 2014 and it will make 2014. I must have regard to the existing scheme. There is, for example, a six-month timeline and I would have to cut off that scheme now if I was to commit to 1 January. That is the time it takes to work through the process. I do not want to do that and I would like to continue the scheme for a number of reasons because there is a cadre of installers and retrofit contractors in place, with some 4,500 people employed, which I want to maintain.

It is uncannily like what happened in Britain. After the first flush of applications, presumably from households minded to be energy efficient, the numbers have fallen off dramatically. Deputy Catherine Murphy is hinting that, if only the scheme was up and running on 1 January, there would be a flood of applicants. I hope she is right because when looking at the energy picture, one of the few tangible things we can do, given that we import our fossil fuels, as Deputy Colreavy said, is to drive the energy efficiency programme, get consumption down and get people to change their patterns of behaviour and save money in terms of import costs associated with fossil fuels. I hope the Deputy is correct but the experience here, in Britain and elsewhere in Europe is that, principally because of the recession, in the case of something that requires householders to put their hands in their pockets to put up a share of the payment for deep retrofit or less than that, they are thinking twice about it just as they are thinking twice about whether to change the car or invest in a new washing machine.

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