Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Smyth. I am not sure whether this is under his Department's remit but I thank him for coming in on behalf of the Minister for housing. My Commencement matter is very simple. It concerns the need for the Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage to make a statement on the supports available to assist people living in older houses of high heritage value to help them to improve their building energy rating, using traditional or more modern building methods, whichever is necessary. Currently, out of the 1.5 million houses owned by people in Ireland, 23.8% of them were built before 1961. A further 20.8% were built before 1980 and another 10% before 1990. More than half of the houses are older houses with bad BER ratings. I have to commend the Government as the retrofit programme in general has been fantastic. We are retrofitting 1,000 homes a week and putting solar panels on 100 homes a day, which is really good. At the same time there is an older, more vulnerable community of people who are unable to avail of this because when a lot of the companies listed under the SEAI as one-stop-shops visit these older dwellings, where people have applied and have waited a long time, they are saying they cannot do anything for them. These are all older people.That is not right or fair. They are usually older, have less money and live in the coldest houses. I know we cannot get everything right overnight but it is time to hear from the Minister of State as to what is being done to help the more vulnerable people. I know many of them personally and have visited many of the houses. It is not fair for any company to be allowed to come down to the house and say it cannot do anything for the person. When I did up an old house, we thatched the roof, which made it highly insulated and we used hemp plaster on the inside of the house to insulate it as well. Things can be done. I did that 25 years ago. How that is not in place now beggars belief. We need to help with the older housing stock, help older people and give them the same funding and supports other people get so that we can hold onto these lovely old houses, people can remain in their old houses and live healthy lives instead of relying on a huge amount of fossil fuels to heat their homes because we have yet to figure out how to support these people using methods tried and tested for many years. The solutions are available. There is cob, hemp and dry stone walling - all of these things can be used. There are plenty of good people; there are great stonemasons and hemp plasterers. I grew hemp 30 years ago and used it to plaster our house. We do not need to pilot this. I do not want to hear about pilot schemes. I want to hear about what is being done about older people in older houses and how we can help them. I welcome the derelict housing grant, which is phenomenal, but I want to know what is being done to help bring the BER up, so that companies are not going down to old people who at last think they are going to get help and are told they cannot do anything for them.