Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026: Second Stage
Seanad Éireann — 2026-05-20
============================================================

Laura Harmon (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel

Cuirim fáilte roimh an Aire. The Labour Party voted against this Bill in the Dáil and we will be voting against it here in the Seanad. We will certainly be putting forward amendments to it, which we hope we can have a fulsome debate on. Ultimately, we agree unequivocally on the need to have urgent action to tackle the infrastructure deficit in this country. Ireland's infrastructure deficit is certainly what makes this rich country feel poor for far too many. Many people are suffering because of this but we cannot pit infrastructure delivery against climate responsibilities. We cannot throw climate responsibilities out the window because of this Bill.
For that reason we strongly object to section 7 of this Bill, which would disapply the public body duty under the climate action Act to perform public functions consistent with achieving the State's climate goals. We have to be thinking long term here. The climate is something that will affect everybody on this island in the coming decades. We need to absolutely prioritise this.
It is not clear where this proposal came from. It was not recommended in the Accelerating Infrastructure report, which was ambitious. It speaks glowingly of our commitment to climate targets. We cannot allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking that we can prioritise either climate action or infrastructure delivery but not both. I think it is a really regressive step if this Government is deprioritising climate. I think there is a real absence within this Government of voices that are really championing climate. This is really noticeable. We absolutely need to insist that this needs to be taken out of the Bill.

---

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/seanad/2026-05-20/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:58+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-20