Departmental Schemes
Dail Éireann — 2021-06-01
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Eamon Ryan (GP), Dublin Bay South

I will commit to looking at that. It is key that we are looking to get to every single house in the country. That is what we have to do to meet this climate change challenge. Every place matters. We have to go to every community in a systematic way. It will take three decades, with 500,000 houses a decade and 50,000 houses a year reached. That is what we need to do. That is why at the launch of the national economic recovery plan today the message given to people was that we need more than anything else young people to start developing the skills, including the craft skills, that will help us in this work. In truth, one of the biggest obstacles to the ramping up we need to do is the shortage of skilled carpenters, plumbers, plasterers and builders to be able to do this work. That is the first, most immediate and biggest constraint. We are spending a lot of money not just on the warmer homes scheme - about €100 million to tackle fuel poverty - but also on social housing. That is another area where we need to ramp it up. The Minister for Housing, Local Government and Heritage, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, has scaled up that budget. We will not give up on this. It will have to be consistent year in and year out to get every home that way, as Deputy Canney rightly said we needed to do.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2021-06-01/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:21+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-06-01