Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West This is a bespoke piece of legislation and a bespoke consenting process for this particular facility. It is a complete exception to our planning process, so it is not good enough for the Minister to say the Government will deal with the issue of public ownership in the second, subsequent piece of legislation. There is absolutely no reason the public element that has been articulated by the Minister throughout could not be reiterated in this legislation. We are doing something entirely new and novel here, and clarity on the public ownership and operation could absolutely be built into this legislation. This would at least alleviate that concern in advance of the second piece of legislation. I do not think the Minister's point on why he is rejecting amendment No. 18 and other amendments holds water. On the wider question of the strategic decision that I and others believe the Minister is taking, this will result in us being locked into LNG well into the next decade. It means focus, resources and money. Let us not forget this is costing us €900 million now and no doubt will be more when the time comes. This strategic decision to spend money here means money will be taken away from the energy transition. The Minister regularly speaks about his accelerating renewable electricity task force and all the great things it has been able to do, but I wonder what that task force says the barriers are when he meets with it. Both he and the Minister, Deputy Chambers, come in here and say the barriers are the planning process, the climate Act and this and that, but when we meet the renewable energy organisations, the first thing they all say is there are not enough staff in An Coimisiún Pleanála and that its decision-making time has increased over the past six months. That is what they tell us; maybe they are wrong, but I do not think they are, to be honest. An Coimisiún Pleanála's size has grown, but it is still not enough. It is still not enough for the level of work it has to do, which is everything from offshore wind to a planning appeal about an extension beside my house. It all ends up in An Coimisiún Pleanála and there is not the capacity or bandwidth to get those decisions done. I do not understand this absolute fixation the Ministers, Deputies O'Brien and Chambers, have about not putting the resources into the one intersecting point of so much of our transport, electricity and infrastructure decisions. Trotting out this line about the Government having doubled it over a certain period is not good enough. The bodies in industry representing wind, solar and battery storage all say it to us, and I have no doubt they are saying it to the Minister in his electricity task force. I have no doubt that when the Minister was meeting with the energy storage groups today, they also brought forward the blockages they see, namely, no clear total amount of electricity storage requirement for the country, one of the key things set out in the task force report published in July 2024; and no clear renewable energy support system for battery storage, putting it at a disadvantage when compared with other forms of renewable energy. This also puts Ireland at a disadvantage compared with other member states, where they are putting in place those supports. The people who have planning permission for battery storage here in Ireland but have not built out yet will move. The money will move if other member states are putting in that financial support. I think it was in April that 18% of the renewable energy in this country was wasted because we did not have the battery storage there. We may be third in Europe but we are still wasting large amounts of renewable energy that can help us make this energy transition and help cut bills for households across this country. That is where the Minister's Department and political focus should be, rather than locking us further into LNG. --- 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/2026-06-30/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-14T01:01:06+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-06-30