Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026: Report and Final Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-05-13
============================================================

Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West

I will come back to the central issue of whether this Bill will make it more or less likely that judicial reviews will be taken, and also the question of whether it will mean judicial reviews are more or less likely to be successful after they are taken. The Minister noted that there have been academic articles discussing the impact of the climate Act. He said this is tangible evidence of the risk of section 15 of the climate Act. I am sure those particular academics are absolutely delighted now to have the Minister reference their work. The impact scores for their research are going to go off the charts now that they have been cited in the Dáil. With respect, however, this is not tangible evidence. The tangible evidence we have about the impact of section 15 of the climate Act is the Supreme Court decision in the Coolglass case four months ago, which made it very clear that section 15 applied to a planning decision and was used to overturn the denial of planning permission. Section 15 protected the infrastructure development in that case. The Government's Bill is disapplying section 15 to the biggest types of infrastructure development that the Government and future Governments are seeking to bring forward. This Bill removes legal provisions that have been held to weigh in favour of the granting of planning permission. Throughout all of this debate, the Minister has failed to address the issue of how section 15 has been found by our Supreme Court to benefit these big projects, particularly where they are seen to have a positive climate impact. When judicial reviews are taken against big public transport proposals, as they always are, that provision is going to be denied to them. In future, the granting of a designation of critical infrastructure to big projects may actually be the death knell of those projects because they will be harder to defend in the courts, not easier.

---

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/dail/2026-05-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:03+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-05-13