Environment (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2025: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-02-17
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Joanne Collins (SF), Agricultural Panel

The Minister of State is welcome. I want to approach the Bill from the perspective of rural areas and agricultural communities because that is where its consequences will be most keenly felt. Sinn Féin has always been clear, and my colleague Deputy Pa Daly has repeatedly stated, that strong environmental protection and climate action depend on public trust. That trust collapses when decision-making becomes centralised, rushed or opaque. The Bill is presented as technical and procedural but for communities living beside waste facilities, large anaerobic digestion plants or industrial agri-processing sites, procedure is substance.
Sinn Féin has consistently warned against the quiet erosion of independent regulation. This Bill places significant powers for the appointment and removal of senior EPA leadership in the hands of the Minister, with a removal threshold described as necessary or desirable. That is not a narrow test and it is not a high bar. While it may never be abused, legislation must be judged on the powers it creates and not the intentions of the Minister of the day. For those in rural areas, the EPA is often the only counterbalance when communities raise concerns about water quality impacts, odour and traffic from anaerobic digestion plants, pollution in already stretched catchments, and threats to fisheries and biodiversity. If confidence in the EPA's independence is weakened, community opposition hardens, legal challenges increase and everyone loses, including farmers and developers who want certainty.
Emergencies must never become a planning shortcut. This Bill expands powers to exempt certain projects from environmental impact assessments and to curtail normal participation procedures in so-called exceptional circumstances. Rural areas already host a disproportionate share of energy infrastructure, waste treatment facilities, grid developments and large-scale anaerobic digestion plants. If these emergency powers are used loosely, particularly for energy or waste infrastructure, communities will rightly fear that consultation is being treated as an inconvenience rather than a democratic necessity. That approach has failed before and we cannot allow these mistakes to happen in the future.
Anaerobic digestion is often cited as a win-win for climate and farming, and it can be when it is farmer-led, co-operative and properly scaled. However, we need to caution against allowing industrial-scale facilities to be imposed on rural areas without consent, particularly where traffic increases through small villages, digestate spreading threatens water quality or local farmers are left managing the downstream impacts. This Bill could significantly increase licensing for large anaerobic digestion plants. Speed may suit the investors but without strong safeguards it risks creating exactly the kind of rural backlash we have seen in the waste sector before, where communities are told the decision has already been made. That is not just transition; it is displacement.
There is potential in the green public procurement provision, particularly for local food producers, short supply chains and lower emission farming systems. Policy designed for corporations can unintentionally exclude family farms and rural SMEs. If green criteria become overly complex, expensive or administratively burdensome, smaller producers will be locked out while large operators will dominate, undermining rural communities rather than strengthening them. Climate action must be accessible and not exclusionary. Strengthening enforcement powers is not in itself objectionable, but Sinn Féin has repeatedly raised concerns that environmental enforcement must be proportionate and even-handed. Too often, small operators face swift action, while action against large polluters is delayed through legal processes and communities are left waiting for meaningful protection. Environmental law must protect people and ecosystems and not simply penalise those with the least capacity to defend themselves.
The Bill will shape environmental governance for years to come. It has to be straightforward. We need to support climate action, renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. We do not need to centralise power away from communities, weaken regulatory independence, use emergency language to bypass democratic participation or treat rural areas as a convenient location for infrastructure that others do not want. If Government wants buy-in for climate action, it must legislate for transparency, independence and genuine community consent. Without that, there will be no just transition, only deeper division.
I welcome the provision for faster licensing, which is very slow in this country, but we also need timelines put in place.
Without timeframes and quicker licensing, everything seems to drag on for so long. The right change we want does not seem to come into play quickly. We are talking about it from generation to generation but nothing happens.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-02-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:38+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-02-17