Gino Kenny (Dublin Mid West, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I welcome this important debate. Just transition is not just a national policy but an international policy. Environmentalists use the great phase that we must act locally and think globally. Everything we do locally is everything we do globally. For a just transition, we need to think of the environmental space as the place and country in which we live and the world we all share. That policy is important, as the Minister of State knows, because to tackle the environmental damage that has been done, and continues to be done, we need to be radical in what we do, individually, collectively and politically.

I wish to speak about one aspect of the just transition, namely, the retrofit programme. I will speak from personal experience. The estate in which I live in Clondalkin, which is made up of 40 houses, applied for the community energy grant scheme. Deep retrofit of a house is revolutionary. It has transformed energy bills. In an ideal world, it would be fantastic if everyone could do likewise but that is not possible because it takes time to retrofit housing.

I will share with the House some statistics that show the challenge around the retrofit of, in particular, local authority houses. South Dublin County Council has just under 10,000 and less than 1% were retrofitted last year. If one does the maths, it will take decades to complete. The scheme has wrapped up this year with the retrofit of 250 houses. At that rate, it will take a considerable amount of time to complete. I have heard some reports, though not relating to the estate I am from, that some of the works have been haphazard and that there may be a problem in terms of the standard of the retrofit. It could be problematic not only in the present but also in the future.

The retrofit programme needs to be extended to everybody. It is important to do that regardless of people's means. We are asking people to spend €50,000 upfront and that is an enormous amount of money. Many people cannot afford that and it can be a barrier to retrofitting.

In Italy, the vast majority of people will get a retrofit of their homes completely free of charge. The Italian Government has brought forward that policy for retrofitting. It is good that there are no financial impediments to retrofitting.

Retrofitting is one of the cornerstones of a just transition. Everyone who has a house, whether provided by a local authority or a private house, in this country is lucky. Our energy bills and carbon footprints need to be smaller and that can be addressed and achieved through the retrofit programme. We need to be more ambitious and ensure the programme is State-led rather than looking for the invisible hand of the private sector to address those issues. That can be problematic because of the limits on the number of houses, particularly local authority houses, that can be retrofitted. The figures at the moment suggest it will take decades before the last people on the list have their houses retrofitted. Retrofitting can make an enormous difference to people's homes, particularly in wintertime when their energy bills are high. A person who is facing fuel poverty spends a considerable proportion of his or her cash on energy bills. If such people had their houses retrofitted, it is a no-brainer that their bills would go down and they would be spending less. The environmental damage would also be reduced. That should give us pause for thought.

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