Christopher O'Sullivan (Cork South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The Dáil recently passed the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2021, which is among the most important legislation ever to come through the House. It is a response to the thousands of young people who marched throughout the country looking for change. It sets fairly ambitious emissions targets and I want to touch on two of the ways we will get to those targets. One is by way of a proper retrofitting programme, such as the warmer homes schemes, which allows old dwellings to be made more efficient in terms of loss of heat and energy usage. At the moment, there is a huge backlog in that scheme because of the lack of available workers with the skills to do the work. The second way is by people being given the opportunity and chance to work from home, thereby cutting down on commuting. However, for that to work, we need a proper roll-out of rural broadband, which has been delayed in many parts of my constituency. These are two elements we must tackle if we are to achieve our emissions targets.

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