Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-16 ============================================================ Alice-Mary Higgins (IND), National University of Ireland Again, with absolute respect, the issue is that the Minister of State is giving us his understanding but that is not the same as having it in legislation. The position taken by the then Minister, Eamon Ryan, and some others was deeply wrong and regrettable. They relied on a policy statement, rather than bringing in the prohibition that should and could have been brought in on public policy grounds under EU law. Ireland would have had very strong grounds, in particular given our national ban on fracking and hydraulic fracking. When we should have had a hard legal measure we had a policy position. We saw that as soon as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil were in government together and the Green Party was gone that policy changed. It flipped. Simply saying "Our policy is" or "I envisage it is this" is not the same as having a definition of "emergency" in the Bill. We do not know what this Government or a future government might decide is its version of an emergency. I appreciate that the Minister of State speaks in good faith about what he thinks it will be, but unless it is in the Bill, that can change, much like the Government that went around the world selling green bonds and saying it was against fracking, fracking is horrendous and came from a Government backbencher at the time. Now, we are suddenly okay with it having an input. Those things change. That is why the law needs to be got right. We are not getting hard measures to copper-fasten the ownership and operation as being public and copper-fasten a definition of emergency. We are not getting solid measures on those safeguards. The other safeguards we have, which are our planning laws and climate laws, are being either fast-tracked or suspended. We are suspending the existing safeguards and are not putting hard safeguards into this Bill, and we are being asked to go on faith. We have seen the dilution in the position in this regard and the deterioration of the commitment in being against this type of hideous accelerant of the climate crisis. This is one of the dirtiest fuels. It involves the production of methane, which is an accelerant. As the Minister of State rightly said, and I know he understands, we are doing this at a time when there is no global space in the atmosphere for it. Anything extra should be happening in developing countries that have been hit by this climate crisis and have not caused it. We are keeping digging and we are buying what people who keep digging are producing. That is the problem. I accept that we are here to discuss it but, frankly, it is not enough to have the Minister of State’s good faith in respect of what he interprets an emergency as being. We have to vote on what is in front of us, and what is in front of us is ambiguous and dangerous. --- 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/2026-07-16/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:52:17+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-07-16