Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank Deputies Ó Cathasaigh and O'Rourke for their contributions. It is important to reflect on Deputy O'Rourke's comments. The retrofit plan is ambitious. We have a serious ambition here. It is also realistic. I absolutely agree with Deputy Ó Cathasaigh. We are not signing up to 220 years but we have been building capacity. In my opening remarks, I referred to the extra companies that are involved. The four of us know that our local ETBs are investing considerably in local apprenticeships and training in this space. As we feed the demand, the demand has to be met by skills and those skills will have to be provided. To reiterate, there will be an €8 billion investment between now and 2030, with some €527 million this year. Last year, 2,250 homes benefited from the local authority energy efficiency scheme.

One of the recommendations of the report that has been actioned on a pilot basis was that local authority and privately owned homes in the same estate or same area would be done through clustering. That makes complete sense. It is mad that you have to recommend it in an Oireachtas committee report, but welcome to this country. That is starting, with a pilot project under way in Fingal. That will feed a lot of work and certainly reach the targets an awful lot quicker. There are also recommendations in the report around the challenges with the private rental sector. That has been found right across the world. We are working under the retrofit plan to encourage landlords to invest in upgrading their properties, which includes access to the home energy upgrade loan scheme and dedicated tax incentives for small landlords to undertake retrofitting works while the tenant is in situ.

I am delighted that an energy poverty action plan is currently being prepared which followed a public consultation process earlier this year. That revised plan will be published later this year. I would be confident enough that it will capture many of the recommendations of this report. I thank the Ceann Comhairle for allowing time for this to be discussed this evening.

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