Longford council chiefs facing costs of government's retrofitting plan

The National Retrofit Scheme, rolled out last year, aims to support homeowners and landlords to invest in improving the energy performance of their properties.

A national fund of €8bn is promised from now to 2030, with €237m spent last year alone.

For the homeowner, grants will now cover up to 50pc the cost of a typical deep retrofit compared to 30-35pc before.

However, at a meeting of Ballymahon Municipal District last week, local councillors were told of the difficulties facing the scheme.

Longford County Council chief executive Paddy Mahon said the local authority were being left to shoulder a sizeable burden in relation to the delivery of the scheme locally.

“We (Longford County Council) are carrying the costs of something that was promised to be 100 per cent funded and it is eating into our own resources,” he said.

The meeting was told up to 20 per cent of the costs of upgrading existing council stock was being carried by the local authority.
Councillors were also told somewhere in the region of 70 to 80 houses had been retrofitted across the county with the vast majority of that coming courtesy of the well documented Just Transition Programme.

News of the shortfall attracted the ire of a number of elected members, most notably Cllrs Ger Farrell and Paul Ross.

“There are houses in Lanesboro that need retrofitting and the council need to get on top of that,” said the former.

“It's something we all want to see done as soon as possible and the promise was that these houses would be brought up to a B2 standard, but we just haven't seen enough of that,” added Cllr Ross.