Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There were four main questions. I will give the Deputy a short answer; we can talk about it further afterwards. There is approximately €3 billion set aside to reach the retrofitting targets set out in the national development plan. The climate plan aims to retrofit a minimum of 500,000 houses with that funding. This includes social and private housing. As to whether that will be revisited, I am sure any future Government will revise that target. It certainly should add to it if it possibly can. Again, that was a ten-year target rather than a 20-year target, but there is real money committed to it. It needs to be implemented because if offers a major chance to deliver success in this area.

With regard to the recent report of the European Court of Auditors on the better energy warmer homes scheme, that scheme is not fully under the aegis of my Department. We are involved in it to a degree but we are not in charge of it. With regard to our part, we implemented changes more than a year ago. The report was only published in the last month but a lot of the auditing work was done more than a year ago. We made changes at that point so the scheme already works much better. Naturally, we will make more changes to it if we can but I confirm that the delivery model has already changed.

On the use of carbon taxes, all parties had different view on this in their manifestos. I am sure that whatever programme for Government comes forward will address the issue. I will not speak to the programme for a Government that has not yet been formed. We will see changes in that respect as well.

With regard to the Deputy's last question, he knows that I have been greatly involved in the area of apprenticeships. We should be thankful that we are now seeing a major increase in the number of people taking up apprenticeships. The figure has increased by thousands every year for a number of years so our plans are working but we need to add to that. We are also trying to progress the suggestion the Deputy put forward.

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