Ciarán McCarthy

Good morning, Clare.

Yeah, there's a few strands to that actually.

Because I know when the Ukraine war started, there was a massive surge, particularly in solar PV.

And you have a similar massive surge again, particularly with solar PV now.

And a lot of this is down to kind of the concept of energy security.

People see what's happening with gas and oil.

They see what's potentially happening even with electricity slightly further down the road.

And they want to have security over their own energy resources.

So you're having a massive surge in solar PV and to a slightly lesser extent, heat pumps as well.

So you would have an electrical heating source

in your house rather than a gas or oil.

Yeah, I mean, it's lower cost, it's a quicker fix and we're coming into the summer now, please God, so you could actually get the benefit of it in the next, I mean, May, we're in May now, May is actually the best month for solar.

So you can get the benefit of it immediately, assuming you can get your contractor sooner rather than later, you know.

Yeah, well, I mean, particularly in the solar, I was talking to a company, Solar Path and Cork, and what they're telling me is like, they would have spent about 5,000 a month on marketing and now they're spending nothing.

They would have gotten 60 inquiries a week.

Now they're getting a hundred inquiries a week.

But between them and Deep Retrofit companies, these are very efficient companies.

They've really upped the ante with the improvement of the grants.

But since the Ukraine war, a lot of companies have arrived on the market.

And the ones that are already on the market are very fit, match fit now at this stage.