Renewable Energy Generation
Dail Éireann — 2026-04-28
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

The new cost-of-living crisis underlines the need to get to 100% renewable energy as quickly as possible. For Ireland, that means developing offshore wind. It is quite incredible that for the past 20 years, successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have been in power and have failed to add any offshore wind energy to the grid. We have less offshore wind energy today than we did 20 years ago, despite all the talk of climate crisis and so on. Why? It is because the Government is relying on the private market and ignoring the lessons of our history, that large-scale energy projects should be publicly owned. It is a point the Minister, Deputy Chambers, made in his budget speech, praising the role of a fledgling State in building Ardnacrusha. We had 80% of our electricity from renewable energy at that point. We had energy security. We had almost zero emissions from our electricity system and we threw that all away to become 80%-----

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-04-28/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:52+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-04-28