The Chief Executive of Longford County Council is calling for greater funding to be allocated to local authorities in order to retrofit social homes.
Speaking at the Environment Ireland conference held in Croke Park this week Paddy Mahon stated one way Councils will meet their climate targets is through increasing the energy ratings of their social housing stock.
However, the local CE raised concern that the scheme to modernise homes is only going to be partly funded going forward.
He says it's critical that this is addressed to ensure the local authority can respond to climate change and meet their climate action goals.
"Just as an example, we did a scheme in Ballinalee last year. We carried out a retrofit on 24 different houses. The cost to do those works averaged 29/30 thousand but the total grant available to us is around 24 thousand. So there's a difference there between the cost and the grant and for one or two houses that's something that you would probably absorb, but if you multiply that by 70 houses done and another 20 to do this year, the costs just escalate and we're already over 5 or 600 thousand euro out of pocket".
