Well, I want to concentrate, if I can today, on the retrofitting of private housing because it’s a project that I’ve been working on for about five years now. I remember meeting initially a Danish parliamentarian involved in their energy committee, where they were looking at ways in which we could go back into retrofit homes, and they weren’t able to get the scheme together, but the germs of that idea started in my mind about five years ago as to how we could do it, and if I wanted one message to go to the people in the country today, one way of really checking whether this is for you or not, on a cold morning like today when there is snow on your roof, when there’s snow on our walls, a simple test, walk outside your house, look up on the roof and if you see snow lying, it means you may have a well insulated house but if you see snow melting quickly ahead of other neighbours that are insulated, it’s a sure sign that you’re wasting money, with heat coming up straight through your roof and what we’re saying to those people today across the country in every county and every town is “contact Sustainable Energy Ireland”. Go on the website Sustainable Energy Ireland, Eoin can give details of it when I’ve finished speaking, and look to see whether this scheme, this home energy saving scheme which we piloted last year and that we’re now running nationally from today, is for you because there is no better investment, there is no better return you will get from money you spent than retrofitting your house to making it more energy efficient, to putting in insulation, to stop wasting money and gas and oil and coal; and by doing this, by setting ourselves the task of getting into tens of thousands of Irish homes this year, we also have the opportunity to create four thousand jobs at a time when rising unemployment and rising dole queues is our primary concern. We can create these jobs in the exact sort of sector that is suffering most, the sort of small contractor, tradesman and building worker who is losing out as their housing construction falls. We want to turn those people to a new task; our prime intention, to turn this country green in its housing and energy efficient. Eoin will give some details on the home energy saving scheme and how it works, but if there’s a simple concept behind it, it is firstly that it should be easy for the householders to do this. This is technical often and complex work and we want to make it easy, where and energy assessor can come into someone’s home, can actually work out what is the best approach to make that home energy efficient and then a contractor and a proof contractor is brought in to do the work. That’s the first thing, making it easy, as easy as you can go in now and buy a fitted kitchen and spend ten/twenty thousand euro, because you know it has been put together as a package. We want a similar package; we have a scheme here which similarly packages energy insulation into a very simple concept.
Secondly, we want this to have status; one of the reasons people spend money is because of status symbols, as in a sense of people seeing it and saying “that looks good”. It’s difficult when you insulate your house because it’s not visible, but there is a way now that we can attach status, we can put a real measure on what we’re doing in our homes and there’s a building energy rating system that’s also administered by Sustainable Energy Ireland. So as part of our home energy saving scheme, we are offering people the opportunity to bring in such an assessor to calculate what the rating of the house is at the present time, to calculate what can be done by a series of works in the house and, crucially, to give a rating estimate after the work is done so you can have that before and after approval, and knowing, more than anything else now, the value of people’s homes which is something maybe we’ve obsessed about too much in recent years but the real value of a home will be judged by whether it’s a D or an F or a B and in this scheme we have the sure-fire best way of improving people’s ratings in their home and increasing the value of your having that vital asset. In recognition of that I am calling on the banks today, and we’ve already sat down and talked to, worked with the banks to come in support of this scheme. The government is giving grant support as a certain percentage of the works that have to be done, but the vast majority, the bulk of the money will come from the householders themselves and I believe that the banks have a real opportunity and role here, to provide funding for that householder, to make up the full amount that it is going to cost, because they can see that this is a real payback, this has a real return that helps pay off that loan. The third, there are three elements that I kind of want to highlight, the first is that this is making it simple, the second is that there is a real measurable change and the third crucial aspect of this scheme, which is slightly more complex than anything we’ve done before, slightly more detailed in terms of government support, the crucial element we want to achieve in this is bringing people together in groups of houses to get the job done at the one time. There is a huge efficiency to be gained at a much lower cost. If you can go into an estate where all the houses are built at the same time with the same fabric and building techniques, if you can go into that estate, as a builder as a contractor or as an assessor with the prospect of doing fifty houses or even twenty houses the cost of doing each individual house is a fraction of what it would be if you were going in on an individual house. This is a hugely beneficial approach to get people on the streets together, to get people on an estate together, even in a rural area to get people with a similar type of, let’s say rural bungalow, together, as long as they have a similar issue, similar problem. Clustered together, so that those building contractors are then ending up dealing with really significant projects which they can price down very competitively which makes a huge difference to our over length picture; so the third thing we are crucially trying to do in this scheme is to get clustering of houses together and there’s no better time to think at the moment, when times are difficult, when there’s architects available that aren’t fully employed, when there’s builders that aren’t fully employed, when we can pull together as a community and say let’s get our assessor in as a community. Let’s get all our housing done in our estate not at the one time and let’s get a really keen price on the back of that, which creates jobs, which cuts our fuel bills and makes us feel good about affecting change and tackling economic difficulties we have. That was the broad concept around the scheme when we were starting to design the home energy saving scheme. We tested it last year and it works, hugely popular; it was right to test it, test out different rates, test out different ways of doing it, SEI have been central to that, but also we are working with the local energy agencies across the country, we are working with the local authorities and we have to work with the building industry and the banking industry now, to make it go national, to really scale it up into a very large project. I’m finished now, I’ll ask Eoin maybe just to give some very simple details around the actual scheme. I said crucially I think today is a day when we are looking at two groups to contact us. We are looking for householders who may be interested to contract SEI, to get an application in; it will take time for that application to turn into an assessment being done, to contractors being appointed. Today is not the day to start working your home. It’s cold, it’s wet, and it’s windy; but today is a day when you plan for next winter, and you say, maybe sometime this spring, maybe sometime this summer, I am going to get a builder in and I am going to turn my home around and make sure that next winter I don’t have the gas boiler burning, next winter I don’t have to get in the extra bag of coal, next winter I’m going to save myself some money, by doing the right thing now and the best right thing now, in these cold winter days is to plan for that different house, to plan to retrofit insulation in it. We are also looking to contractors, we are putting out a signal here today to building contractors to join this scheme; it will require set standards, it will require them to work to the highest standards because what we don’t want to do is to support anything that brings difficulties down the line, so we’ll have proper controls of standards that SEI and others can manage; and we want contractors to take part in recognising it’s going to be a real business opportunity here for people to create jobs and create enterprises.