Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Seanad Éireann — 2026-07-16
============================================================

Timmy Dooley (FF), Clare

I thank the Senators for the amendment. I would welcome having all of them in government as some stage. I have no doubt that they would find it challenging on occasion, maybe not as challenging as me because they would not have the firepower coming back at them to challenge them as well as they are doing to us on this occasion.
The scope of this legislation is limited to what is necessary to allow an application to get through development and to get the consent to be submitted towards the end of 2026. This is critical to achieving the accelerated delivery of the project, which is at the core of this legislation. As I said previously, there will be further legislation and policy measures that we will bring forward later in the year to ensure the operation of the strategic gas reserve in accordance with the decision that was taken back in March and that will also include addressing the end-of-life provisions.
I do not want to create any false hope but as we progress by bringing more energy ashore by getting more renewables on the grid, the expectation is, of course, that the dependence on fossil fuels will reduce significantly, particularly in respect of gas used for electricity generation. That is obviously an important part of it. There are other elements of our economy where we have a good bit more to do, particularly on transportation, etc., and there is a lot of work on there.
However, I get the Senator's point about having a plan towards the end of life and her point about any future Government that may not be as environmentally conscious as the Senator suggests we are; I thank her for that, I appreciate it. I have no doubt that were any of the Members in government it would remain, but we can never predict what the future holds. Neither, of course, can you prevent a future Government from making its own decisions that might differ with where we are at now.
We have to look at this practically, and we need to send signals as to what would constitute the elimination of risk and what would allow you to be in a position not to have that security reserve in place. We will be addressing that at a later stage, and I am sure we will try to find some common ground on that.

---

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