Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Heat pumps have been fitted in more than 3,700 homes, which was a 66% increase on the previous year. Yes, we need to go further and faster, and we will do that. In particular, we need to improve a lot of the online and other bureaucratic systems around heat pump supports, which are not as flexible and as fast as I would like to see, in order to deliver the scale and number of heat pump installations we need. We will accelerate that.

The implication of the Deputy's question is that in hard-to-reach houses, the solution should be liquid biofuel boilers. I do not agree with that because I do not believe it would be sustainable. It would deliver households down into a cul-de-sac where those fuels would not be seen as the correct solution. Given the limited quantity of the fuels, they are best targeted at the transport rather than the heat sector. We will have to look at a whole range of other solutions, including heat pumps, district heating and, in some instances, wood-fired heating in isolated houses in the countryside. However, the solution will not be biofuel boilers because we have to consider biodiversity as well as climate in our sustainability criteria. The sustainability issue arising from everyone turning to biofuel is a severely critical issue that we cannot ignore.

See this speech in context