Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to raise this matter. There was a debate on it in the immediate aftermath of the great surge in prices. I expected that there was going to be a set of proposals from the Government to help people to respond quickly to the challenges they faced. I will point towards a number of things that could be done immediately. I would like to see the Minister of State, Deputy Joe O'Brien, take these up with his colleagues.

The first relates to the 1.5 million homes that will not be reached by the retrofitting programme in the next ten years. We should ensure that all of those houses, or as many of them as possible, get heat controls installed if they have inadequate attic insulation and if the cavity walls can be done. The 80% grant is welcome but we need a serious wave to confront this issue. We should extend the 80% grant to heat controls. The reality is that we could save up to 25% of the energy use in these homes. For these poorly insulated and poorly heated homes, this would represent 2 tonnes of carbon per home per year. That is an exceptional opportunity for us and we are not grabbing it with the determination I believe is warranted.

The second thing I will mention is that we have rolled out, at public expense, 750,000 smart meters and intend to have another 1 million installed by the end of this year. They are not being used to cut the cost of electricity for those who have them. That is simply not happening. There is an offer to homes but it is not being taken up. We need to move again with a sustained campaign to get that opportunity taken up. I reckon that could result in very significant savings. Even if only 10% of energy consumed, which is 4,500 kWh, was switched from fossil fuel-generated energy to renewable energy, the impact on our carbon footprint would be very significant. We would be switching from a kWh that costs 500 g of carbon to one that costs 0 g.

The third thing relates to electric vehicles, EVs. From the latest figures, we see that 20% of people are now buying electric cars. This figure has doubled in the last 12 months. That trend is going to continue but there is an obstacle standing in the way, which is the roll-out of public chargers. Despite three years of access to a €5,000 grant, the councils have not installed one EV charger in a public place.

They should be targeting areas, like those in all of our constituencies, where people do not have their own driveways. They should install chargers in the lamp poles and parking kerbs to allow those people to buy EVs. Even if that led to only a 2% increase in the number of cars sold, each one of those is 3 tonnes less carbon. This is low-hanging fruit. It is a real opportunity we could seize. Such chargers do not have the complication of a deep retrofit and they are available to very wide groups of people. They would be visible and tangible evidence this is something that needs to be done now and not put off until a one-stop shop comes to town. These are things that can start the momentum and give communities a chance to build from the bottom up.

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