Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Second Stage Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-07 ============================================================ Patricia Stephenson (SD), Labour Panel The Government's handling of this legislation has been appalling. Not only is it preposterous that a Bill that will see almost €1 billion being invested in fossil fuel infrastructure is being rammed through the legislative process with little opportunity for proper scrutiny; it is also ludicrous that we are even debating such investment in fossil fuels in view of the scale of the climate calamity we are facing. This is not a future problem; it is a problem of today. The climate crisis and climate breakdown are very much on our doorstep. Anyone who goes out into nature can see that at first hand. As we speak, Europe is quite literally being scorched by extreme temperatures, which is wreaking havoc on healthcare, energy and transport systems. Schools are closing. Vulnerable people are dying as a consequence of the climate change we are seeing. Scientists tell us that this is direct result of a climate crisis driven by the burning of fossil fuels, yet here we are being asked to sanction a €1 billion investment in LNG. This is, quite frankly, a betrayal of our children and the generation that will come after them. There are warnings that we cannot reverse this and that we will see an increased frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Europe, which is warming at more than twice the global average. Within the next decade, global temperatures will likely increase by more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. This is the critical tipping point identified in the 2015 Paris Agreement that will have devastating consequences for humanity. Despite the scale of climate catastrophe we are hurtling towards, the Government appears to be the victim of a sort of climate fatigue or, perhaps, cognitive dissonance, with its head in the sand pretending it is not happening. Not only has the Government conceded that we are not even going to get close to meeting our 2030 emissions reduction targets, but we continue to see it rowing back on climate ambition, not least through the disapplication of climate laws and biodiversity protections when they are inconvenient, which we seem to be doing with this legislation. I feel that the Government's failure to explicitly state in this legislation that the LNG terminal will be State owned and State led and not for commercial use is taking us for fools. If it is going to be State led and not for commercial use, then the Government should just put it into the legislation. It is quite simple. We can then trust that the protections exist. We can be forgiven for not trusting that this will be provided for at a later stage, given that there has been a complete lack of transparency thus far and we have seen the rollback of key climate provisions. It is hard, therefore, to have any faith that these protections will somehow manifest in legislation down the line. The Bill speaks to a broader mismanagement of demand of our energy system, with the Government consistently prioritising the needs of energy-hungry big business and corporate interests over those of ordinary households and our environment. The reason we apparently need this €1 billion LNG facility is to safeguard supply, but we have large energy users, like data centres, that have proliferated in the State, driving up prices for consumers. The environmental impact of these resource-intensive data centres is stark and their energy needs are outpacing the development of new renewables. According to new figures from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, for 2025, data centres now account for almost one quarter of Irish electricity usage, and this is set to increase to one third by 2030. The stark reality is that we are now a cautionary tale for the rest of the world in how not to manage energy. We heard this from the UN report. The public did not sign up for this or for having the highest energy prices in Europe. It is the public who have to foot the bill for these data centres and it is again the public who will have to foot the bill for the €1 billion LNG facility, which could actually be used by private companies for their profits, because there are no protections in this legislation to stop that from happening. I do not see public or community buy-in for this approach. Why has the Government decided to steamroll any attempt to include safeguards for the public interest and the environment in this legislation with the promise that we will get protections further down the line instead of just putting them into the Bill in the first place? There has not been sufficient transparency and sufficient consideration has not been given to the alternative approaches to account for our national climate objectives while the world burns. Watching Europe on fire, and the heat in our own communities, I feel a degree of existential dread about the future of the climate, of our environment and of our humanity in the current context we are seeing. I cannot fathom why we would not have any protections in this legislation if the Government also felt any concern about the climate. --- 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/2026-07-07/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:55:09+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-07