Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I will start with Deputy Griffin. On wool insulation, I can say that I know absolutely nothing about that and I will get a proper answer for the Deputy. I will not attempt to answer that without knowing about it.

Turning to Deputy Burke, this is a very significant plan for 500,000 homes and it requires 25,000 staff. A very significant amount of planning went into this even before the programme for Government was drawn up last year by the Green Party, the Government and the former Minister, Deputy Bruton’s Department, which had been investigating how to do this. There are some 25,000 people involved with a €28 billion investment, €8 billion of which was to come from the Exchequer. It is an enormous project and a great deal of work has been done with the Minister, Deputy Harris, to ensure we have a sufficient number of apprentices. This is very skilled work and is a completely new way of doing plumbing, in addition to the other work that is being done.

On the issue of inflation, I am working on that with the Office of Government Procurement. Public procurement in general and the whole national development plan are affected by these changes in inflation. That will also affect the retrofit plans.

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