Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to debate the climate action plan. As the Minister of State said, it is very welcome we have opportunities like this to have these discussions. I welcome also the intention from the Government side and the talk of urgency, ambition and the need to actually get moving. I appreciate the comments from Deputy Leddin and look forward to working with him on the committee to ensure we put meat around those comments.

I believe the climate action plan is ambitious. The difficulty with it is whether it is achievable and whether it is going to be achievable by the Government. In order for us to determine whether that is the case, we need to look at past delivery on targets set down by the Government and how it is doing on achieving those. I am not looking back to previous Governments. I am talking about commitments that have been made by the Green Party, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the current Dáil.

Retrofitting is one of the key elements of the climate action plan. There is a commitment to have 500,000 homes retrofitted by 2030. One of the key constraints on delivering that is the construction workers and the people to do it. I recently retrofitted my home and it was very difficult to get people to come on site to do that work and that is going to be an issue for anyone looking to get that work done. The fact is there is no specific retrofitting apprenticeship scheme in the country at the moment, despite all the rhetoric we hear about the need for one. In December 2020, the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, said that within three months, there would be four retrofitting centres of excellence delivered across the country. That sounded fantastic and made for great press. Unfortunately, as only one has been delivered, that is a commitment that has not come to pass. On 18 February the Minister, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, launched the energy efficiency retrofitting programme. That targeted 2,400 social homes with retrofitting upgrades. To date, 1,099 homes have been completed across five counties, so there is a big deficit there.

In 2020, he announced the midlands retrofitting programme where 750 units were to be retrofitted. To date, only 100 units have been retrofitted. The average time between application for a warmer homes grant and completion of the upgrade is 26 months, but that average hides a postcode lottery when it comes to getting these grants. In my home county of Wicklow, there is a two-and-a-half-year wait for a surveyor.

Electric vehicles are, again, another key tenet of the climate action plan. In August 2019, the Minister announced the roll-out of 1,000 public charging points. Since that time, only two councils have implemented that measure and just 29 out of 1,000 charging points have been installed. Last year, the percentage of State vehicles that were electric was 1.12%. This year it is 1.5%. It has not even gone up by a percentage point, despite more than 4,000 extra cars being registered by the State in that period.

It is clear that while the ambition may be high, the delivery is not. Alarm bells are ringing very loudly for me when it comes to this delivery. When I mentioned it previously to the Minister, Deputy Ryan, he said that we are in the middle of the Covid pandemic. I acknowledge that will slow things down but in instances where there can be no Covid excuse, such as the percentage of State vehicles that are electric, why is the State not purchasing electric vehicles at present? That is not a Covid-related issue.

When it comes to the retrofitting of housing stock, how come some councils could carry this out during the Covid pandemic and some could not? It was possible because some councils did it. We have to recognise that we do not know when we will be out of Covid. We are in the middle of a climate and biodiversity crisis now. We, and the Government, will have to work out a way to meet these targets, regardless of what is happening in our health system. The Government will have to speed things up, implement measures properly and ensure delivery is there because it is has not been there to date.

I also want to talk about the level of spin we have seen in recent times. I was very disappointed with the discussion of the climate action plan and how it was a €125 billion programme. It gave the impression the Government was going to invest €125 billion to enable all communities to get involved in climate action when that was, in fact, private money. It was rather unfortunate the Government gave that impression because it made the climate action plan seem much more feasible than it actually is.

I have repeatedly heard Government Deputies talk about how the carbon tax is ring-fenced and directed towards climate actions. That is not the case. It is just the increases in the carbon tax that are ring-fenced. Government Deputies either know that or they do not. If they do not know that, I ask the Minister of State to explain it because it again gives the wrong message. The majority of the carbon tax does not go back into climate action. I have seen Ministers who think that is the case. This is a matter the Government needs to get clear. The Social Democrats agree with and support the carbon tax but we want to see it ring-fenced so every person in our community can afford to make the climate action changes we will require of them.

I would have liked more time. It is an important discussion and six minutes for the Opposition is too short, but I thank the Acting Chairman for the opportunity to speak on this matter.

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