Paul Donnelly (Dublin West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The debate is taking place in the midst of a massive rise in the cost of living. I urge people to attend the protest on Saturday, 24 September, at the Garden of Remembrance at 2 p.m. It will be one of the biggest protest marches we have seen in a long time.

The existing national retrofitting plan has two distinct streams. These are the better energy warmer homes scheme, which aims to provide free retrofits to those on certain social welfare payments, and the one-stop-shop service that requires households to have significant savings on hand to invest in retrofitting. For everyone else in between there is little or no support for upgrading the BER standard of their homes. This leaves them living in colder homes with mounting energy bills. We need to change this. Many households do not qualify for free upgrades and many do not have the cash needed to avail of the 50% matched grant support. The Government's plan excludes too many households.

What would Sinn Féin do? We would replace the better energy warmer homes scheme with a new retrofit scheme for low and middle income households including area-based components for deep retrofits. Among other measures, households could be eligible for various levels of funding from between 100% to 65% of the cost of retrofits depending on household income. We would increase funding for local authority retrofits. As always, the most disadvantaged are those who suffer the most and have to await local authorities. It is important that local authorities are given enough funding to ensure all the homes they rent are retrofitted. We would establish a new retrofit scheme for solid fuel homes under which households could be eligible for various levels of funding up to 100%. We would replace the one-stop-shop with tiered support for higher-income households. The scaled-down one-stop-shop scheme would continue but with the State's support tiered based on household income. Under this scheme households may be eligible for 50% to 100% of funding towards the cost of retrofits. Sinn Féin proposes increasing the retrofitting budget to a total of €500 million next year. This would be a 50% increase in funding compared to this year. However, we will not just increase funding. Most importantly, we will target those most in need.

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