Development (Strategic Gas Reserve) Bill 2026: Committee and Remaining Stages
Dail Éireann — 2026-06-30
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Roderic O'Gorman (GP), Dublin West

I wish to speak in favour of Deputy Ahern’s amendment. It is important that we focus on the issue of the use of LNG through this facility and, as such, into Ireland’s energy network. Liquefied natural gas is about two thirds more carbon-emitting than traditional natural gas. We are introducing it into our system now, as a number of speakers have already pointed out, in a context where liquefied natural gas was banned through the ban on fracked gas brought in by the previous Government in 2021. This ban applied to the use of fracked gas in all circumstances, whether by State infrastructure or by private infrastructure. That ban was important. One of the first things this Government did was to remove that ban, which my colleague, Eamon Ryan, introduced. That ban was removed on fracked gas being used by either State infrastructure or private infrastructure. We heard Deputy Danny Healy-Rae celebrating the consequences of the removal of that ban on fracked gas.
Not all LNG used in the world is fracked but the vast majority of the LNG that comes from the US, which the Government has indicated it would regard as its primary supplier for the facility in Clare, comes from the fracking process, which makes the carbon emissions from LNG even worse. We are tying a new source of energy, LNG, into our energy system. This is a system that was shown not to give security of supply, as demonstrated by the closure of the Ras Laffan gas terminal at the start of the Iran war, and shown not to result in affordability. A 46% increase in the cost of LNG in one day was prompted by that war. LNG is one of the most carbon-intensive versions of gas that exist in the world right now.
We are achieving this in the exact same legislation where we are disapplying the analysis of the climate Act to LNG infrastructure. Section 33, which I and others are opposing, will disapply the tests and analysis under section 15 of the climate Act. To think that the newest piece of fossil fuel infrastructure built in this country will not have basic climate analysis applied to it – climate analysis that almost all parties in this House agreed on only a couple of years ago – shows how far the Government has retreated on the issue of climate. A fundamental gap in this legislation is that a new piece of fossil fuel infrastructure will not have this analysis applied to it.
By creating this exemption, we are actually building a norm. That norm will be seen in the legislation we will be debating in a couple of minutes, which also has the exemption. That norm was seen in the Critical Infrastructure Bill that this House passed a number of weeks ago. Time and again, this Government is exempting some of the biggest fossil fuel-polluting proposals from an analysis under the climate Act. It is killing the climate Act with 100 or 1,000 small exemptions. It is a very deliberate process, a process we have seen repeated many times. For this reason, my party and I cannot support the legislation before us. It does not give us the energy security we deserve. It does not give us the energy affordability that families need, and it dramatically undermines the decarbonisation agenda that the Government should be following.

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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