Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30 ============================================================ Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West Today is 30 June. It should go down as the day of the bonfire of our climate targets. In this one swift afternoon, we will make real the Minister's softly saying just after Christmas this year that we would not reach our energy targets. What does that look like in reality? It looks like ramming through measures, with no parliamentary oversight, no proper debate and, in the case of the next Bill we will discuss, no economic impact assessment, which will mean we are not coming close to meeting our climate targets because they are being ignored. We now have this climate change legislation. Every time we raised previously, whether we would reach our climate targets, the answer was not to worry because we have legally binding targets and, therefore, we will meet them because it is the law, and we have to meet the law. Now we are just disapplying the law to anything to do with climate. We are disapplying the law from LNG, data centres and Dublin Airport. If anything is actually polluting, we are told the climate targets do not apply to that and not to worry about that. It is a joke. We are all expecting the world to go along with the idea that we are all following the science and doing what we need to do when the Government is absolutely in hock to fossil fuel companies, the big airlines, Donald Trump and the people who are responsible for destroying our planet and hoping that people just stay asleep. That is what this two-hour debate is about, what the next two-hour debate is about and what I would say the two-hour debate after that, with respect to AI, is about too. It is about avoiding a real airing of the issues here and hoping that people do not notice that this Government is utterly abandoning all climate commitments, in this case basically in order to satisfy Donald Trump. Who will pay for that? Our children and grandchildren will pay for it. We see the impact of climate change, even in Europe, where people are dying as a result of extreme heat. In a more immediate sense, people will pay with euro from their pockets. This thing will cost €1 billion or more. Who will pay for that? The public will pay by a household levy on energy bills. The public will pay for this LNG development. The Government is locking in fossil fuels. That is the consequence of investing in fossil fuel infrastructure. We should not be investing in any fossil fuel infrastructure at all. It flies in the face of the science. The Government is locking in not just any fossil fuel infrastructure but the dirtiest possible fossil fuel infrastructure because, ultimately, this is about fracked gas coming from the USA. The Climate Change Advisory Council told the Government that further expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure through an LNG terminal will commit Ireland to further fossil fuel lock-in. It told the Government and it is simply ignoring the council. This is not dealing with the issue of energy security. It is making us reliant on Donald Trump for energy security, or the next US Administration. The consequence is devastating. I put on the record now the hazards that are present here. I quote Stop Shannon LNG, which stated: The importing of LNG is associated with hazards such as gas explosions, threatening local communities. A key risk in LNG facilities is an uncontrolled release of a cryogenic, toxic, or flammable fluid. This can include liquid releases that form a pool on the ground or water and ignite, creating a potentially long-lasting pool fire. That is on the Minister of State and this Government. The disastrous effects of locking us into fossil fuels and tearing up all of our targets is also on the Government. I think energy security is the Trojan horse. The Government wraps up LNG and says it is energy security. We were not originally told and people will not understand this. The whole terminal has to be emptied six times a year, so a large portion of the gas currently used in this country will end up being fracked gas. It is a Trojan horse. The Government is not excluding commercial developments in this Bill. The original argument was not to worry because it would only be this one emergency reserve, and it would just sit there. That has moved to being something that will sit there and be emptied six times a year, and the Bill is open to it being moved even further. If the Government was serious about the issue of energy security, it would be investing in battery storage, interconnectors, and different forms of renewable energy that work in different weather conditions, including wind, solar, hydro and so on. What is this about? It is about being friendly to Donald Trump. This is a key ask in terms of the tensions between US imperialism and the EU. He basically had two asks. One was to buy more energy and the second was to buy more of our weapons. This is about appeasing Donald Trump. It is also about a matter related to not the next Bill but the one after that, the AI Bill, which is saying to big tech companies not to worry about all the energy usage, that they have a green light to go and use as much energy as they want for their data centres and that we will burn more and more fossil fuels to facilitate data centres. The idea that we can continue on this track of expanded energy usage, in the best case scenario simply uses up the extra renewable capacity that we are adding, or in the worst case scenario, the vista that is being opened here for commercial LNG and what is happening in many data centres around the country that we will burn gas. In this case, we will burn fracked gas as a consequence. I am interested in the Minister of State's response. The main thing is that we can agree or disagree on any of these arguments. That is fine. It is a disgrace not to allow us to debate the Bill, not to have a Committee Stage that can go through it properly, not to give proper time on Report Stage and not to allow us to get through the vast majority of the amendments that we have before us. It is a disgrace and it is a conscious and cynical move by the Government. --- 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