I sincerely believe that from a climate perspective, this is perhaps the most regressive legislation produced by the Government. Any legislation or infrastructure that requires us to overturn a ban on fracked gas is just inherently bad for the climate. I heard the Minister of State on "Morning Ireland" this morning and I sympathise with his desire to enhance our energy security, particularly in the current context. We all understand the vulnerabilities Ireland faces. We know the risks posed by geopolitical instability and our over-reliance on imported fossil fuels. Equally, we know the importance of ensuring households can heat their homes, hospitals can operate, businesses can function and that our entire energy system remains stable in times of crisis. None of us dispute that. Energy security matters, and there are lessons to be learned from the events of recent years when it comes to our energy system and energy security but it appears, based on this effort to import even more fossil fuel, that the Government is learning precisely the wrong lessons. I would absolutely support genuine measures to strengthen Ireland's energy security. We raised these during pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill. Other Deputies have raised them in this House today already. They include investment in renewables, energy storage, interconnection, demand management and grid improvements. This is the direction of travel we want to see, if we are serious about energy security and our climate commitments. Look at Spain. Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, it rapidly scaled up investment in renewables and it is now largely insulated from the recent fossil fuel price shocks because it is not importing quite so much oil and gas. This is the sort of effort we want to see here and I would gladly support the Government in such efforts. What I and the Labour Party cannot support is legislation that risks locking us into greater fossil fuel dependence, while simultaneously weakening planning safeguards, diluting climate accountability and concentrating an extraordinary amount of power in the hands of a Minister. It is frankly ludicrous that the plan the Government has landed on to strengthen our energy security is to import more harmful and increasingly volatile fossil fuels. I would have thought recent events might at least have given pause for thought. We were talking about having to ration oil and gas just a few months ago. The reality that is becoming increasingly apparent, and which the Government is refusing to accept, is that strengthening our energy security and continuing to rely on imported fossil fuels are incompatible. As I have said on a number of occasions, the best and perhaps only way to genuinely secure our energy supply into the future is to urgently and significantly scale up our renewable generation and, importantly, our storage capacity. We have the potential to achieve genuine energy sovereignty and, crucially, we have the potential to do so from clean sources. The Minister of State could have brought forward a Bill that would inject much-needed urgency into the deployment of renewables, particularly offshore wind. He could have brought forward a Bill to speed up the necessary works that need to be done on our ports so they can handle offshore wind turbines, or he could have prioritised the long-awaited marine protected areas legislation to ensure the necessary environmental safeguards are in place. He would certainly have my support in doing so. Instead of seeking to speed up the deployment of renewables, the Government is further entrenching expensive, harmful and unreliable fossil fuels in our system the supply of which, at the end of the day, is largely out of our control. We fundamentally cannot reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by importing more of them. This will lock us into fossil fuel use for decades and the infrastructure contemplated here - offshore moorings, the onshore terminal, pipeline connection to the existing gas network - represents capital investment with a multi-decade operational lifespan. There is a structural tension with statutory climate commitments that require a trajectory to net zero by 2050 and which include carbon budgets. In our pre-legislative scrutiny report, the Oireachtas climate committee recommended a sunset clause be included in the Bill with a clear phase-out mechanism and explicit decommissioning requirements. All of that is absent. Sometimes I wonder why we bother. There is no sunset clause, no legislated end date and no statutory pathway towards closure of the facility. There is no requirement the facility cease operations once particular energy security or renewable generation benchmarks are met. While the Government presents this facility as a sort of temporary, emergency piece of infrastructure, there are virtually no safeguards against it becoming a permanent feature of our energy system. This is where the lack of trust in the Government's plans for this facility other Deputies have spoken about comes from. I and other members of the Opposition have submitted amendments to give effect to our pre-legislative scrutiny recommendations and I hope the Minister of State will genuinely consider these on Committee Stage. The Minister of State is bringing forward this Bill on the back of an energy security review, but the landscape has changed completely since that review was carried. Even prior to the present fossil fuel crisis, during pre-legislative scrutiny, the committee heard extensive evidence suggesting the assumptions made when the review was conducted around demand, security risks, renewable deployment, storage technologies and so on, had evolved considerably in the meantime and the committee report recommended a new review be carried out on that basis. That recommendation has also been ignored. Let us talk about the cost. It has been estimated that the LNG terminal will cost just shy of €1 billion over the next decade. How will that be paid for? It will not be through higher prices levied against large energy users like data centres. Last week, the Labour Party brought forward a motion calling on the Government to make data centres pay their fair share, but it was voted down. Ordinary household bill payers, who are already being fleeced, will foot the bill for this. The committee made several recommendations on the cost burden of the facility. The first recommendation of the report says the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU, should have to carry out an assessment of the impact on household bills and justify the socialisation of LNG costs across households and small businesses. There is a also a recommendation that costs be weighted towards large energy users rather than households and another that an overall cost-benefit analysis be conducted. Again, none of these feature in the Bill. No protections for consumers against higher bills are included in the proposed law. I would like to know whether any assessment has been carried out on the impact the recent crisis in the fuel markets has had on the Government's cost estimate. The European benchmark price for LNG soared by as much as 60% in the days following the start of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war on Iran, after the shutdown of a major LNG facility in Qatar. God knows when that war is actually going to come to an end and presumably the current extreme level of volatility is not priced into the previous cost estimate. The likelihood is the price we end up paying for this terminal over the next decade will far exceed €1 billion. This underscores the irresponsibility of going ahead with this proposal. We simply cannot secure our energy supply by further exposing ourselves to price shocks like this. We are already vulnerable to an increasingly unstable geopolitical arena and ordinary households and commuters are paying the price. Charging ahead with the introduction of even more fossil fuels to Ireland will only make matters worse. One of the things that has frustrated me most in the conversation on energy security and this particular proposal is that energy insecurity and this LNG terminal are presented in binary terms as if it was a simple choice between building LNG infrastructure and energy insecurity, which I do not accept. There are alternatives, some of which I have mentioned, that strengthen security while simultaneously reducing emissions and that reduce our fossil fuel dependence rather than increase it. These alternatives have already been demonstrably successful elsewhere in Europe and I have already referred to Spain. It is incredibly frustrating this is being presented as our only option. This Bill goes well beyond just being an energy security matter. It seeks to bypass not just our climate laws but also our planning laws which, funnily enough, were presented as the Minister's magnum opus in his previous brief. Sections 6 and 7 disapply both the Planning and Development Act of 2000 and the Planning and Development Act of 2024 to designated development carried out under an approval granted under section 29, which itself concentrates decision-making power in the hands of the Minister. Planning consent processes under those Acts would ordinarily require consideration of national planning policy, including the national planning framework and any climate-related material considerations. Their disapplication removes that layer of scrutiny entirely and channels decision-making exclusively to the Minister. We saw a similar arrangement in the passenger cap Bill earlier this week. It is true An Coimisiún Pleanála has to carry out an environmental impact assessment and an appropriate assessment which the Minister must consider but he must also consider "the urgent need to ensure and protect the security of gas supply in the State". It is pretty obvious the latter will be given precedence. Regrettably, despite the current extreme hot weather warnings and our abysmal record on decarbonisation, there is yet again no urgency when it comes to the climate. It is quite clear the only urgency the Government considers is facilitating more imported fossil fuels via an LNG terminal or essentially unrestricted additional flights from Dublin Airport. There is no real statutory requirement on the face of section 29 of the Bill for the Minister to give reasons for departing from, or accepting, environmental assessments beyond a few generalities. With this Bill the Government is trying to ram through approval of a hugely damaging piece of infrastructure by creating a bespoke planning route unavailable to other projects and certainly not ones that would benefit us from a climate and decarbonisation perspective. Like the passenger cap Bill, this is a significant departure from normal planning practice. It is a departure several stakeholders raised concerns about during pre-legislative scrutiny at the climate committee. Nobody is claiming our planning system is perfect - far from it - but public confidence depends on decisions being made through transparent and independent processes. When Government proposes to remove a project from the ordinary planning framework and place final authority directly in the hands of a Minister, it has a duty to demonstrate such extraordinary powers are absolutely necessary. I am not convinced it has done so. The Bill goes further still. For the third time this term and the second time this week, the Government is proposing we abandon section 15 of the climate Act which requires public bodies to perform their functions in a manner consistent with national climate objectives and climate policy. Disapplying it removes a legally-operative constraint that would otherwise require those bodies to weigh climate considerations in discharging their statutory functions. This is a deliberative legislative choice to insulate the project from climate scrutiny at the decision-making level. By consistently disapplying section 15 when it is politically inconvenient, the Government is rendering it effectively meaningless but it exists for a reason. Climate and environmental considerations are not an optional extra. The climate crisis is quite literally existential and section 15 of the climate Act more generally is the legal framework through which we seek to meet our obligations. When Government starts carving out exemptions from climate legislation for fossil fuel infrastructure, it raises serious questions about the credibility of our commitment to our climate goals. If our obligations can be set aside whenever they become inconvenient, what confidence can the public have that climate legislation means what it says? This issue featured prominently during pre-legislative scrutiny. Several witnesses voiced concerns about this provision, which will effectively deem LNG infrastructure compatible with our climate laws regardless of the emissions impact. Recommendation 13 of the pre-legislative scrutiny report stated "The Bill should explicitly state that the Strategic Gas Emergency Reserve will be required to comply with Section 15 obligations under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015". The Bill does the exact opposite. The recommendations in that report were agreed on a cross-party basis. There were some recommendations that did not make it in because we voted against them and the Government voted them down but this report was agreed across parties. To see it ignored so thoroughly is very depressing. This is the second aggressively anti-climate Bill we have seen from this Government this week alone. The Government is telling people that taking climate change and our biodiversity crisis seriously was a luxury of a previous era and something that is now preventing progress. I fundamentally disagree with that line of thinking. The climate catastrophe facing us requires progress but it is a different kind of progress to the one this Government is currently offering. There is huge opportunity for our country in tackling our climate crisis. There are huge numbers of new jobs to be created, new industries to be established and new futures to be forged. This Government can and should be treating decarbonisation and our climate targets with the same urgency it is treating the delivery of this LNG reserve, the removal of the Dublin Airport cap and the provision of critical infrastructure. The Government is going to guillotine debate on both this Bill and the Dublin Airport cap next week. In the Labour Party, we have a vision for a different kind of Ireland which is a fairer, better future-facing country but the proposals and Bills being put forward by this Government lack ambition for that different kind of Ireland and a different world. This Government is all about simply continuing the status quo and going back to doing things the same way we always have done, that is, captured by fossil fuel interests. Those of us who want this to change are called Luddites. The guardrails put in place by the previous Government to finally force this State and its governments to face up to our climate obligations are being systematically dismantled. I, the Labour Party and others in opposition will continue to push this Government to live up to its responsibilities and to give some hope to our future generations, who badly need it. We will be putting forward numerous amendments to this Bill and I look forward to debating them in the House in the limited time that is being given. I really hope the Government will take them seriously and integrate as many of them as possible into the legislation.

Sentiment score: 0.08