Ceisteanna ó na Comhaltaí Eile - Other Members’ Questions
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-14
============================================================

James O'Connor (FF), Cork East

The Tánaiste's comments are welcome and the fact that we are having this debate is a healthy thing. Input from all sides of the House would be welcome, and that is why I am proud to bring this forward. We need to discuss dealing with our future demand. We know we are looking at a 45% increase in energy need in Ireland up to 2034. That cannot be delivered by renewables alone. We will be heavily depending on carbon energy to do that. We need to face the fact that Ireland could be fined €3.5 billion to €8 billion of public money annually by the European Commission if we fail to meet our decarbonisation targets.
This is the great conundrum. We have a population that has grown by 1 million since 2006 and is expected to grow another 1 million in the same period of time in the future. We will have a 45% increase in energy demand.

---

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/2026-05-14/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:56+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-14