Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-06-16
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Laura Harmon (LAB), Industrial and Commercial Panel

I want to speak to amendment No. 3. I will make some general points on the legislation. The Labour Party voted against this Bill in the Dáil. We agree that action is needed to tackle the infrastructure deficit in this country but we believe the Government has misdiagnosed the problem. This Bill would allow the Government to designate specific projects as critical infrastructure and thereby instruct public bodies to prioritise them and co-ordinate with other public bodies to deliver them. However, we strongly object to section 7 of the Bill, which would disapply the public body duty under the climate action Acts to perform public functions consistent with achieving the State's climate goals. We believe this would amount to repealing that duty by stealth and it would almost certainly be open to constitutional challenge.
Amendment No. 3 proposes:
A designation order shall be laid before each House of the Oireachtas as soon as may be after it is made, and the order shall not have effect until a resolution approving it has been passed by each such House.
This amendment would require that a Government order designating a project as critical infrastructure be approved in advance by a resolution of both Houses.
This Bill opts for the negative resolution rather than the positive resolution procedures such that an order has effect unless it is annulled by the Dáil within 21 sitting days. The reason the Labour Party is bringing forward this amendment is to make sure there is proper legislative oversight of how the Bill is applied.
This Bill grants an awful lot of power to the Minister. The statutory threshold for what will be counted as critical infrastructure is not clear. It seems to be at the full discretion of the Minister. We believe this is a democratic deficit. The Minister might outline a process he envisions here today but there is nothing on the face of the Bill to stop a future Minister designating any number of projects as critical under his or her own arbitrary opinion. We are proposing this amendment to try to correct that and to provide some modicum of democratic oversight on those decisions. We really need to make sure there is adequate legislative oversight of the designation of projects as critical infrastructure.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2026-06-16/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-06-16