Eoin Ó Broin (Dublin Mid West, Sinn Fein)
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214. To ask the Minister for Environment, Community and Local Government whether his attention has been brought to Britain's National Audit Office report about failures of insulation schemes with the quality of installations of external and internal wall insulation and suspected fraud on the energy company obligation; and whether similar concerns have been raised about insulation schemes here. [59667/25]

Darragh O'Brien (Dublin Fingal East, Fianna Fail)
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The Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland (SEAI) is responsible for the administration of a range of home energy upgrade schemes funded by my Department. The SEAI administer these schemes in line with a code of practice, technical guidance documents and the SEAI Customer Charter. They also operate a quality assurance programme to monitor and maintain contractor standards.

The SEAI has informed my Department that they are confident that the issues identified in the report referenced by the Deputy are unlikely to arise on SEAI grant schemes.

The SEAI requires wall insulation products/systems to have Irish Agrément certification. NSAI Agrément is the single certification body that certifies wall insulation products/systems used in retrofit and maintains a register of installers for external (and cavity) wall insulation.

The SEAI owns the auditing/inspection regime that allows it to monitor performance of contractors on its schemes. The SEAI inspects a proportion of works, and inspections also take into account performance of contractors i.e. the lower performing contractors are inspected at a higher rate to monitor if performance is improving. If it is not improving, further sanctions may be taken up to removal of a contractor from the SEAI register meaning they cannot work on any SEAI grant schemes.

The SEAI grant schemes are overseen by a single entity, the governance of the schemes is very robust and the SEAI are in a position to quickly address performance issues. Further to this, the SEAI also now has a dedicated role to improve standards and quality across its schemes with planned improvements for the quality of delivery across all schemes.