Climate Action Plan
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-16
============================================================

Darragh O'Brien (FF), Dublin Fingal East

I will take a couple of examples of where the commitments are. I agree with the Deputy. The next plan has to question how we can look to bridge the gap. We need to recognise the progress that has been made by our people and by successive Governments in this regard. That is why, looking at our retrofit programme, we have made some very significant changes to the grants to make them more accessible. People are responding to that already, just short of two months since we made those changes. We can do a lot of things to improve our resilience, reduce our energy use and make our homes more climate friendly and healthier. We can also do the same for business. We are looking at a suite of business grant measures to reduce energy use in business. Again, I agree with the Deputy on this. The reliance or over-reliance in certain areas on fossil fuels and our dependency on imported fossil fuels are a risk and a weakness, and we need to move away from that.
I will take two areas. I refer to grid investment and the €18.9 billion. PR6 is critical, and I know Deputy O'Gorman knows that. It is a matter of our taking more renewables into our grid. We are already the number one country in Europe in the integration of renewables into our grid, but it is a matter of our expanding that further and bringing more storage so that we can deploy and dispatch energy at the appropriate times. We have over a gigawatt in storage now. We can now trade in the electricity market, which is a good thing, too. We need to increase our storage and our renewable capacity. The projections in that regard to the end of the decade are good, while not hitting 80%. In the CAP 2026, for example, on energy, we will see how we can get to 80% without the offshore renewables because the offshore will not be electrified by 2030. The focus there is getting it into construction.
On transport, €2 billion of the climate and nature fund, as the Deputy knows, has already been deployed to MetroLink, which would be one of the biggest decarbonising projects from a transport perspective. That is backed with money. I want the CAP 2026 to be a real plan that people understand. It has to be ambitious and has to be backed financially, and I intend that it will be.

---

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/2026-04-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:49+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-16