Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I do not have the figure but I will ask the Department to come back to the Deputy directly on this. As I said, there will be significant carryover on this, as in other areas. A lot of this is because in the first Covid phase between March and June, the construction sector by and large, like the rest of the economy, was shut down. We still have ongoing issues in terms of building up the contractors' capability and capacity to deliver a lot of this work. The Government has been adopting the right approach in that in the budget the Minister, Deputy Harris, indicated significant investment with up to 1,500 apprenticeship places specifically in the area of retrofitting. Previously it used to be bedevilled by stop-start contract arrangements whereby contractors would have to wait until early in the new year to know when they would get work for that year. They then had a short window during the summer when they did the work and they stopped again in the autumn. What we did in the July stimulus this year was change the rules so we can run 12 months of the year and right the way around.

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