Ceisteanna ó Cheannairí - Leaders' Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-03-04
============================================================

Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West

As the Middle East is in turmoil, we are witnessing another spike in the price of fossil fuels, which still power too much of our economy. Our energy system needs to meet three key challenges in the year ahead.
It needs to provide affordable energy, which will allow us to travel and warm our homes without breaking the bank. It needs to provide security of supply so we are not at risk of energy shortages in a turbulent world. We need to decarbonise our energy system to address the climate crisis and improve air quality around our homes. The Green Party has always argued that the only way for us to meet these three interconnected challenges is for us to scale up wind, solar and energy storage at pace. One of the big changes between this Government and the previous one is that this Government has identified the use of LNG as a key part of its energy strategy. This is seen not just in the proposal for a State-owned terminal in Clare but in the wider removal of policies like the ban on fracked gas that will serve private LNG providers. I hope the impacts of this war on energy pricing cause the Taoiseach to change his policy. Embracing LNG, as the Taoiseach proposes, fails to deliver affordability. It actually locks us in to the continued cycle of energy price shocks. We have the evidence of this in the spike in gas prices over the last few days. Nor does LNG provide us with security of supply. Qatar's decision yesterday to shut its Ras Laffan gas terminal shows how fickle gas supplies can be across the world. An Irish LNG terminal will leave the US as the main supplier of LNG imports and thereby place our energy security at the whim of the Trump Administration.
Of course, LNG is the exact opposite of decarbonisation as the fuel is two thirds more carbon intensive than traditional natural gas according to research from the International Energy Agency. Ireland needs its own energy so we can make our own choices, yet the ORESS 1 offshore renewable energy projects all seem to be stuck in the mud. The State has a target of 5 GW of offshore renewable wind energy by 2030. At this point it looks like the Taoiseach's Government will achieve none of that. We are in a position now, with the decommissioning of the Arklow Bank, where we may actually have less offshore renewable energy at the end of this Government than at its beginning. What is the Taoiseach's best estimate of when we will see the 5 GW of offshore wind delivered? In light of the curtailing of supply and the huge spike in the cost of LNG in recent days, will the Taoiseach reconsider the Government's policy to introduce LNG into our energy mix as it fails all three tests of affordability, security of supply and decarbonisation?

---

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/2026-03-04/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:43+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-03-04