The Minister will be doing it tomorrow since he said that yesterday. The Minister is pretty good at organising administrative schemes. Will he be able to tell us tomorrow how this scheme he has designed will work? Is it too much to ask him to bring the announcement of that forward by one day and tell us now how it will work since the Ceann Comhairle has ruled me out of order twice in trying to raise this matter on the adjournment? The official White Paper that accompanied the GIS statement reads as follows:
Grants for conversion from oil to solid-fuel heating.
A grant of up to £600 is available for the installation of a fireplace, stove or other solid-fuel burning appliance in a house which has not got one. In determining the amount of the grant, the cost of installing a back boiler is taken into consideration. A householder who has an oil-fired central heating system but no fireplace could qualify for this special grant, which is not subject to the normal limiting periods for further grants. If he is able to connect central heating radiators to a solid-fuel burning appliance, the Department will raise no objection but the cost of central heating connections and elements will not be allowed for grant purposes. Where a house has already a fireplace but no back-boiler, the cost of installing a back-boiler including plumbing connections will reckon for grant.
That is the official Government information slip which I obtained. If there is additional information which the Department have, which was issued at the same time, perhaps the Minister can clarify that for me. There is, unfortunately, no date on the GIS statement that I have. As I already stated the title of the statement is House Improvement Grant Scheme and Energy Conservation. The first paragraph states:
The Minister for the Environment, Mr. Sylvester Barrett, T.D. is concerned that effective measures be taken to conserve energy in domestic housing.
I suppose, as an Opposition Deputy, that one should be grateful that at least some of the noise we have been making on this side of the House penetrates to the other side of the House. The second paragraph states:
To this end, he has already laid down thermal insulation standards for local authority houses commenced on or after 1st July, 1976. These standards will apply in full to new private houses in July, 1979.
That is about three years overdue. The statement continues:
Where existing houses are concerned, the position is that under the house improvements grants scheme, a house on completion of the improvement work must be provided with adequate heating facilities, including a solid fuel fireplace. The cost of providing these facilities, including a back-boiler, if one is being installed, is taken into account in calculating the amount of the grant. Where a house has no solid fuel heating facilities and no other improvement work is required, a special grant is available for the installation of a fireplace or solid fuel burning appliance. This special grant does not prevent a householder from getting a further improvement grant at any time.
As a further contribution to energy conservation in existing private houses, the Minister has decided that a house, after completion of grant-aided improvement work, must comply with certain standards in regard to attic insulation, cylinder lagging and draught elimination. The cost of these works will be reckonable in calculating the amount of the grant. This requirement will apply to work commenced on or after 1 April 1979.
There is no date on this statement from the Government Information Service and when Deputy Fitzpatrick yesterday said it had been reported in the papers before 7 June, the Minister replied that the newspaper story was reported on 14 June. When people rang the Department at the numbers 684169 and 684411—I believe there are three telephone extensions for the Dublin area in O'Connell Bridge House—the interpretation of that statement by officials in the Department was that first there would be a delay of six to nine weeks before an inspector could call and that the staff were completely snowed under in trying to cope with the applications which makes a nonsense of what the Minister said yesterday about a more efficient operation of the grant scheme from a centralised Department. The real point at issue is this: the people who inquired if they would qualify for a grant despite the fact that their house was built within the past ten years or that they had received a general improvements grant, were told initially that they would qualify. Then on last Friday week a directive appears to have come from Government sources saying the Government had changed their mind and that there was going to be a re-jig of the terms of the scheme. The Minister would appear to confirm this by saying that he will be making a statement on the new terms of the scheme.
This appears to me to imply two things. First, it was an election gimmick that did not even have the merit of being properly thought out but which had at least the merit of being a good idea in terms of energy conservation and for that the Labour Party welcome it. I am not party to the operation of administration in the Department and I can only put together the experiences of my constituents and people in the Dublin area, but it appears to me that somebody in the Department thought the scheme was a good idea but they did not work out the implications or the cost. When the applications started to come in and when somebody calculated what it might cost, the Department appear to have backtracked. That is the construction I am putting on the experiences of people who responded to the Government press release when they contacted the Department. I was unable to raise this matter on the Adjournment and perhaps the Minister would give us a trailer of what he is going to say tomorrow in relation to the new terms.