Gas (Amendment) Bill 2023: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2024-01-24
============================================================

Ossian Smyth (GP), Dún Laoghaire

I am not saying this is all covered already. What is outlined in amendment No. 4 is covered already. That amendment seeks that GNI complies with the terms of the climate Act. I am saying GNI is already covered by that. It absolutely is.
GNI is not covered under what is referenced in amendment No. 6, which seeks the right to refuse connections and so on. What is outlined in that amendment is coming in under the gas package. That is what we need to transpose. The changes outlined and the rules as they have been written in amendment No. 6 are not compliant with what we agreed to in the new gas directive. As I said, we have to make sure that if a gas distributor refuses connections, it is doing so in a fair and proportionate way and so on. Many conditions were included in the gas directive. However, I agree we need to legislate in that area. We need to make sure GNI is mandated to refuse connections where those connections would not comply with its climate obligations. I agree that needs to be legislated for. That is what we committed to doing last month as part of the gas package. There are two parts to that gas package. One is the regulation and the other is the directive. The regulation comes into force right away but the directive part will have to be legislated for as national legislation. That should be done as a priority.

---

Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2024-01-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:52:35+00:00
Sitting date: 2024-01-24