Climate Action Committee to hear from Secretary General of the Department of Housing, Planning & Local Government

Committee Chair, Hildegarde Naughton, said today, “We need to make the 2 million plus houses in Ireland far more fuel efficient in order to lower carbon emissions. The Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government has a key role, especially in respect of retrofitting all our social housing stock. In addition we need to ensure that our building regulations are delivering nearly zero energy building so as to avoid having to retrofit those houses in the next twenty years. ”

“We do need to put a huge investment into our housing stock and we also need to get our planning guidelines sorted especially to deal with on-shore wind farms and how near to homes they can they be located. Our off-shore planning and licencing needs to be tackled now so that Ireland can take advantage of off-shore wind generation. The potential to glean clean energy from off-shore wind will play a significant role in our energy generation in years to come as fossil fuel generation is phased out.”

The meeting will start at 2pm in Committee Room 3, Leinster House.

Committee proceedings can be viewed live here