Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Climate action is often very abstract for people because it does not appear to make any difference to their lives. One area where it can make a real and tangible difference, particularly given the energy price hikes and the cost of living, is in the area of retrofitting of people's homes. If we insulate and retrofit people's homes we can save their energy bills to a very large extent. What is increasingly clear, however, when we look at the Government's plan to retrofit 500,000 homes is that in the first three years of the plan the Government has only managed to retrofit 16% of the target. The number reaching the BER 2 standard of retrofit - a high level of retrofit - is far less than that.

The Society of Chartered Surveyors Ireland conducted a survey asking people about where they see the problems with retrofit and 44% of people said the grants were insufficient and the cost was too excessive. That is the big problem: the least well off are the most in need of their homes needing to be retrofitted to reduce the cost of living and the cost of energy but they are least able to actually afford to retrofit their homes because the cost is too much and the grants are too small.

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