Ciarán Ahern
Dublin South-West · Labour Party · Ireland
“What we are asking for today is simply that the Government lives up to the commitment made in the programme for Government to carry out a new, independent feasibility study for an extension of the MetroLink from where it is currently due to end in Charlemont, out to Dublin south west.”
“It examined quite a nonsensical route that finished abruptly in Knocklyon, and therefore it significantly underestimated the cost benefit of the project.”
“This all comes back to funding our schools. All too often, despite the much publicised overspend in the education budget, schools still have to fight tooth and nail to get the resources they need. I never predicted that so much of my time as a TD would be spent working with local schools on funding and resourcing issues.”
“As the capitation grant is not covering basic operating costs, many school boards feel that to avoid running deficits, which they will get into trouble for from their governing bodies, they have to find funds elsewhere.”
“As the Minister knows, parents are paying hand over fist for ancillary school costs, be it for school uniforms, laptops, school transport or the so-called voluntary contributions. We cannot say we have free education in this country if the whole architecture that enables proper participation is hugely expensive for parents.”
“Some parents are now having to pay hundreds of euro for devices if their children are to just fully participate in school. As this motion states, we are at risk of creating a digital divide and new inequalities in our education system unless we put further supports in place for low-income families. Kevin Shortall, principal of St.”
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“I have a couple of points on what the Minister said. As part of our pre-legislative scrutiny, we looked at the energy security review that this is all based on. The review was conducted a number of years ago. The international situation has changed markedly since that review was conducted. Even the price of LNG on the markets has increased massively since Trump's war on Iran. We had asked for that review to be updated in light of the most recent massive market instability in the fossil fuel market. We also believe that review was flawed in terms of the solutions it offered or the potential solutions that it looked at. It seems to have looked at solutions in isolation. We have gone through all of this previously.”
“That is why I am very supportive of this amendment and the other amendments on the emergency nature of this facility and the temporary nature of the reserve. There is a lot of money being invested in this infrastructure. It was €1 billion last time and it will most likely be more at the next estimate. This is long-term fossil fuel infrastructure that is being built. We want to believe that the Minister that this is only going to be used in emergency circumstances and is not going to be commercially driven but there is nothing in this Bill to give us any confidence in that. That is the problem. That is why we are proposing these amendments and I am supporting them.”
“I do not understand, given everything we were told beforehand, why none of this is in the Bill. What is the Minister afraid of? As Deputy Whitmore has said, it gives rise to a lack of trust for those of us who are trying in good faith to scrutinise this legislation and spending huge amounts of time at the committee and in here putting forward proposals if all of that is simply going to be ignored. If the Minister's belief is that this is to be used in emergency circumstances only, then why not say that explicitly in the Bill? Why not have a definition of what an "emergency" is, as the committee recommended? Our fear is that this is just going to add to national gas demand. It is going to facilitate the importation or additional gas, not just gas to be used in emergency circumstances.”
“I echo a lot of the points made already about the temporary nature of this and what we have been promised. I am looking at a briefing from the Department of energy on 4 February. We were given numerous briefings by the Department about this. The Minister tried to avoid pre-legislative scrutiny and our committee had to fight for it. We have a report with 43 recommendations, all of which seem to have been ignored in this Bill. This briefing, which was given to us by the Department as part of our pre-legislative scrutiny, talks about this being "a state-owned gas storage facility" that will be "an emergency reserve" and that it "is not intended for commercial use and will not act as a new entry point for gas into the system". It talks about the reserve only being used "in the event of a major disruption to sub-sea gas pipelines".”
“I urge the Minister to put all his resources into getting the complex legal issues at the heart of this Bill sorted as quickly as possible, and deliver accountability and justice for survivors at long last who just cannot keep waiting.”
“The Bill will enable the recovery of damages from these religious orders and the lay-run trusts into which they have moved their assets. No longer will the grubby practice of lay-run trusts shielding orders from providing redress be possible. In short, it would deliver accountability at last. I welcome some of the comments made by the Minister and the encouraging noises from the Taoiseach earlier this week about Deputy Bacik's Bill and how it aligns with Government priorities. This day six months will obviously be Christmas Day. I put it to the Minister that in deferring the Bill for six months, he is acting as the anti-Santa. He is delaying justice. I appreciate it is a complex issue but we have been talking about this for a long time.”
“What we are really talking about here is impunity. These are wealthy, powerful groups of people who protected abusers in their ranks and now protect themselves from the consequences. I have to say, having gone to one of their schools, the Christian Brothers, CBs, are notorious. It seems that as a policy they do not nominate a defendant to a court case. They use their unincorporated status to avoid accountability. It is sickening to see. This Bill is about saying, "No more." We should not have to accept this. Survivors should not have to accept it. We clearly cannot rely on any spirit of Christian charity from these orders. It is time to get tough and to get survivors the redress they deserve. We can start to legislate for that here this evening if the Government chooses to support this important Bill.”
“There is a veil of fog around the financial affairs of these orders that is troubling. The total value of assets held by religious congregations, orders and institutions is unknown, despite a number of official processes that sought to estimate these resources. After the mother and baby homes report was published, negotiations with eight religious bodies involved in those institutions sought to secure financial contributions. Only two organisations responded to requests for specific financial information and five did not offer any contribution. We know these are wealthy organisations. An analysis of the financial returns provided by a sample group of religious congregations to the Charities Regulator has shown that collectively they have had approximately €1.3 billion in cash and other assets.”
“They advocate for redress schemes that are not exclusionary and that live up to the promises of the reports and recommendations that proceeded them. The redress schemes introduced have at least showed an understanding on the part of the State that there was a wrong to be righted. The attitude, meanwhile, of certain religious orders has fallen short of that. We have seen the reports of mixed engagement from religious orders on redress. We have heard the stories right from the mouths of the brave survivors who have had to go through the difficult retraumatising experience of the courts to get the redress they are owed. We know that many of the orders that facilitated, enabled and covered up child sexual abuse for years and years continue to hide behind the legal fiction of lay-run trusts to escape accountability for the horrors they caused.”
“We will never know the real extent of the lives destroyed by institutional abuse during those dark decades. There is a moral obligation on this State and us, as legislators, sitting in our national Parliament to do by right by survivors. Successive governments have recognised that moral imperative. That is what led to the redress schemes that followed the Ryan report, the report on the mother and baby and county homes and other reports. Many of those schemes have been deeply flawed and have, at times, retraumatised victims and their families. Indeed, my wife, Maeve O’Rourke, and her colleagues in Justice for Magdalenes Research and the Clann Project have been to the forefront in advocating for justice for survivors of Magdalene laundries and mother and baby homes.”
“I begin by saying how proud I am that the Labour Party and my colleague, Deputy Bacik, are bringing forward this Bill today. I also welcome the visitors to the Public Gallery. This is a Bill about fairness, accountability and justice. It is a Bill that is rooted in the bravery of survivors who have refused to be silent and simply roll over and take whatever paltry offers come their way. This country’s history during the last century was, for far too many of its citizens, one of abuse and failure. We are all too aware of the many revelations that have emerged and continue to emerge in recent decades. We have all heard the horrific stories of what was inflicted on innocent children and women behind the high walls of religious institutions in cities, towns and villages across this island.”
“I thank the Minister of State for his comments. The project has been at stage 2B for a considerable period, for the last year in fact, and the school is just waiting to hear back from the Department. We know that another tranche of projects is going to be approved. As the Minister of State said, there will be new projects approved in early 2027. The school wants to know what it needs to do to ensure it is on the list for early 2027. If the Minister of State could arrange a meeting with the Department, it would be helpful. One of the issues the school is having is that it is just not getting anything back from the Department. Even facilitating some communication for the school and ensuring that it can do everything possible to ensure it is next in line for the next tranche would be helpful.”
“In the six years since then, nothing has happened. We now have a derelict site right beside a school. As Deputy Lahart said, we have an incomplete school with incomplete education, but we also have a fairly serious health and safety risk to the school community and the community at large. A small fire was started in that area. There are potential insurance issues for the school because of that. We are just looking for the school to get this building completed, as was promised 25 years ago, as Deputy Crowe said.”
“The issue of a school not having a sports hall is one very close to my heart because I went to the boys' school next door to Sancta Maria College, Coláiste Éanna, as did Deputy Lahart. For my entire time there, we had no sports hall. It means the school cannot offer PE, which is so important for children's mental and physical health. Even in the time since a sports hall was completed in Coláiste Éanna, we can see that a basketball club has developed in the area. It is a case of if you build it, they will come. It is such an important asset, not just for the school but for the area too. As the other Deputies have said, this is something that has been completely out of the school’s control. The building project started back in 2018. In 2020, during Covid, the developer, the builder, went bust.”
“This Government is all about simply continuing the status quo and going back to doing things the same way we always have done, that is, captured by fossil fuel interests. Those of us who want this to change are called Luddites. The guardrails put in place by the previous Government to finally force this State and its governments to face up to our climate obligations are being systematically dismantled. I, the Labour Party and others in opposition will continue to push this Government to live up to its responsibilities and to give some hope to our future generations, who badly need it. We will be putting forward numerous amendments to this Bill and I look forward to debating them in the House in the limited time that is being given.”
“There is huge opportunity for our country in tackling our climate crisis. There are huge numbers of new jobs to be created, new industries to be established and new futures to be forged. This Government can and should be treating decarbonisation and our climate targets with the same urgency it is treating the delivery of this LNG reserve, the removal of the Dublin Airport cap and the provision of critical infrastructure. The Government is going to guillotine debate on both this Bill and the Dublin Airport cap next week. In the Labour Party, we have a vision for a different kind of Ireland which is a fairer, better future-facing country but the proposals and Bills being put forward by this Government lack ambition for that different kind of Ireland and a different world.”
“The Bill does the exact opposite. The recommendations in that report were agreed on a cross-party basis. There were some recommendations that did not make it in because we voted against them and the Government voted them down but this report was agreed across parties. To see it ignored so thoroughly is very depressing. This is the second aggressively anti-climate Bill we have seen from this Government this week alone. The Government is telling people that taking climate change and our biodiversity crisis seriously was a luxury of a previous era and something that is now preventing progress. I fundamentally disagree with that line of thinking. The climate catastrophe facing us requires progress but it is a different kind of progress to the one this Government is currently offering.”
“When Government starts carving out exemptions from climate legislation for fossil fuel infrastructure, it raises serious questions about the credibility of our commitment to our climate goals. If our obligations can be set aside whenever they become inconvenient, what confidence can the public have that climate legislation means what it says? This issue featured prominently during pre-legislative scrutiny. Several witnesses voiced concerns about this provision, which will effectively deem LNG infrastructure compatible with our climate laws regardless of the emissions impact. Recommendation 13 of the pre-legislative scrutiny report stated "The Bill should explicitly state that the Strategic Gas Emergency Reserve will be required to comply with Section 15 obligations under the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015".”
“Disapplying it removes a legally-operative constraint that would otherwise require those bodies to weigh climate considerations in discharging their statutory functions. This is a deliberative legislative choice to insulate the project from climate scrutiny at the decision-making level. By consistently disapplying section 15 when it is politically inconvenient, the Government is rendering it effectively meaningless but it exists for a reason. Climate and environmental considerations are not an optional extra. The climate crisis is quite literally existential and section 15 of the climate Act more generally is the legal framework through which we seek to meet our obligations.”
“It is a departure several stakeholders raised concerns about during pre-legislative scrutiny at the climate committee. Nobody is claiming our planning system is perfect - far from it - but public confidence depends on decisions being made through transparent and independent processes. When Government proposes to remove a project from the ordinary planning framework and place final authority directly in the hands of a Minister, it has a duty to demonstrate such extraordinary powers are absolutely necessary. I am not convinced it has done so. The Bill goes further still. For the third time this term and the second time this week, the Government is proposing we abandon section 15 of the climate Act which requires public bodies to perform their functions in a manner consistent with national climate objectives and climate policy.”
“It is quite clear the only urgency the Government considers is facilitating more imported fossil fuels via an LNG terminal or essentially unrestricted additional flights from Dublin Airport. There is no real statutory requirement on the face of section 29 of the Bill for the Minister to give reasons for departing from, or accepting, environmental assessments beyond a few generalities. With this Bill the Government is trying to ram through approval of a hugely damaging piece of infrastructure by creating a bespoke planning route unavailable to other projects and certainly not ones that would benefit us from a climate and decarbonisation perspective. Like the passenger cap Bill, this is a significant departure from normal planning practice.”
“Their disapplication removes that layer of scrutiny entirely and channels decision-making exclusively to the Minister. We saw a similar arrangement in the passenger cap Bill earlier this week. It is true An Coimisiún Pleanála has to carry out an environmental impact assessment and an appropriate assessment which the Minister must consider but he must also consider "the urgent need to ensure and protect the security of gas supply in the State". It is pretty obvious the latter will be given precedence. Regrettably, despite the current extreme hot weather warnings and our abysmal record on decarbonisation, there is yet again no urgency when it comes to the climate.”
“It is incredibly frustrating this is being presented as our only option. This Bill goes well beyond just being an energy security matter. It seeks to bypass not just our climate laws but also our planning laws which, funnily enough, were presented as the Minister's magnum opus in his previous brief. Sections 6 and 7 disapply both the Planning and Development Act of 2000 and the Planning and Development Act of 2024 to designated development carried out under an approval granted under section 29, which itself concentrates decision-making power in the hands of the Minister. Planning consent processes under those Acts would ordinarily require consideration of national planning policy, including the national planning framework and any climate-related material considerations.”
“We are already vulnerable to an increasingly unstable geopolitical arena and ordinary households and commuters are paying the price. Charging ahead with the introduction of even more fossil fuels to Ireland will only make matters worse. One of the things that has frustrated me most in the conversation on energy security and this particular proposal is that energy insecurity and this LNG terminal are presented in binary terms as if it was a simple choice between building LNG infrastructure and energy insecurity, which I do not accept. There are alternatives, some of which I have mentioned, that strengthen security while simultaneously reducing emissions and that reduce our fossil fuel dependence rather than increase it. These alternatives have already been demonstrably successful elsewhere in Europe and I have already referred to Spain.”
“I would like to know whether any assessment has been carried out on the impact the recent crisis in the fuel markets has had on the Government's cost estimate. The European benchmark price for LNG soared by as much as 60% in the days following the start of Trump and Netanyahu's illegal war on Iran, after the shutdown of a major LNG facility in Qatar. God knows when that war is actually going to come to an end and presumably the current extreme level of volatility is not priced into the previous cost estimate. The likelihood is the price we end up paying for this terminal over the next decade will far exceed €1 billion. This underscores the irresponsibility of going ahead with this proposal. We simply cannot secure our energy supply by further exposing ourselves to price shocks like this.”
“Ordinary household bill payers, who are already being fleeced, will foot the bill for this. The committee made several recommendations on the cost burden of the facility. The first recommendation of the report says the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU, should have to carry out an assessment of the impact on household bills and justify the socialisation of LNG costs across households and small businesses. There is a also a recommendation that costs be weighted towards large energy users rather than households and another that an overall cost-benefit analysis be conducted. Again, none of these feature in the Bill. No protections for consumers against higher bills are included in the proposed law.”
“Even prior to the present fossil fuel crisis, during pre-legislative scrutiny, the committee heard extensive evidence suggesting the assumptions made when the review was conducted around demand, security risks, renewable deployment, storage technologies and so on, had evolved considerably in the meantime and the committee report recommended a new review be carried out on that basis. That recommendation has also been ignored. Let us talk about the cost. It has been estimated that the LNG terminal will cost just shy of €1 billion over the next decade. How will that be paid for? It will not be through higher prices levied against large energy users like data centres. Last week, the Labour Party brought forward a motion calling on the Government to make data centres pay their fair share, but it was voted down.”
“There is no requirement the facility cease operations once particular energy security or renewable generation benchmarks are met. While the Government presents this facility as a sort of temporary, emergency piece of infrastructure, there are virtually no safeguards against it becoming a permanent feature of our energy system. This is where the lack of trust in the Government's plans for this facility other Deputies have spoken about comes from. I and other members of the Opposition have submitted amendments to give effect to our pre-legislative scrutiny recommendations and I hope the Minister of State will genuinely consider these on Committee Stage. The Minister of State is bringing forward this Bill on the back of an energy security review, but the landscape has changed completely since that review was carried.”
“This will lock us into fossil fuel use for decades and the infrastructure contemplated here - offshore moorings, the onshore terminal, pipeline connection to the existing gas network - represents capital investment with a multi-decade operational lifespan. There is a structural tension with statutory climate commitments that require a trajectory to net zero by 2050 and which include carbon budgets. In our pre-legislative scrutiny report, the Oireachtas climate committee recommended a sunset clause be included in the Bill with a clear phase-out mechanism and explicit decommissioning requirements. All of that is absent. Sometimes I wonder why we bother. There is no sunset clause, no legislated end date and no statutory pathway towards closure of the facility.”
“The Minister of State could have brought forward a Bill that would inject much-needed urgency into the deployment of renewables, particularly offshore wind. He could have brought forward a Bill to speed up the necessary works that need to be done on our ports so they can handle offshore wind turbines, or he could have prioritised the long-awaited marine protected areas legislation to ensure the necessary environmental safeguards are in place. He would certainly have my support in doing so. Instead of seeking to speed up the deployment of renewables, the Government is further entrenching expensive, harmful and unreliable fossil fuels in our system the supply of which, at the end of the day, is largely out of our control. We fundamentally cannot reduce our dependence on fossil fuels by importing more of them.”
“I would have thought recent events might at least have given pause for thought. We were talking about having to ration oil and gas just a few months ago. The reality that is becoming increasingly apparent, and which the Government is refusing to accept, is that strengthening our energy security and continuing to rely on imported fossil fuels are incompatible. As I have said on a number of occasions, the best and perhaps only way to genuinely secure our energy supply into the future is to urgently and significantly scale up our renewable generation and, importantly, our storage capacity. We have the potential to achieve genuine energy sovereignty and, crucially, we have the potential to do so from clean sources.”
“Following Putin's illegal invasion of Ukraine, it rapidly scaled up investment in renewables and it is now largely insulated from the recent fossil fuel price shocks because it is not importing quite so much oil and gas. This is the sort of effort we want to see here and I would gladly support the Government in such efforts. What I and the Labour Party cannot support is legislation that risks locking us into greater fossil fuel dependence, while simultaneously weakening planning safeguards, diluting climate accountability and concentrating an extraordinary amount of power in the hands of a Minister. It is frankly ludicrous that the plan the Government has landed on to strengthen our energy security is to import more harmful and increasingly volatile fossil fuels.”
“Energy security matters, and there are lessons to be learned from the events of recent years when it comes to our energy system and energy security but it appears, based on this effort to import even more fossil fuel, that the Government is learning precisely the wrong lessons. I would absolutely support genuine measures to strengthen Ireland's energy security. We raised these during pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill. Other Deputies have raised them in this House today already. They include investment in renewables, energy storage, interconnection, demand management and grid improvements. This is the direction of travel we want to see, if we are serious about energy security and our climate commitments. Look at Spain.”
“I sincerely believe that from a climate perspective, this is perhaps the most regressive legislation produced by the Government. Any legislation or infrastructure that requires us to overturn a ban on fracked gas is just inherently bad for the climate. I heard the Minister of State on "Morning Ireland" this morning and I sympathise with his desire to enhance our energy security, particularly in the current context. We all understand the vulnerabilities Ireland faces. We know the risks posed by geopolitical instability and our over-reliance on imported fossil fuels. Equally, we know the importance of ensuring households can heat their homes, hospitals can operate, businesses can function and that our entire energy system remains stable in times of crisis. None of us dispute that.”
“What is the Government going to do for those parents who are genuinely suffering because of a commercialised and for-profit childcare model?”
“A childcare facility in Knocklyon in my constituency was recently taken over a by a new provider, which was recently bought by a UK group in a deal worth €75 million. Since the facility was taken over, there have been numerous room closures. Parents have effectively been stranded without childcare with no notice. The services have taken away flexibility in terms of reduced hours over the summer or attending part time in after-school care. The services are getting worse because they are now being run in the interests of the owners' pockets, and parents are afraid that this facility will withdraw from core funding. Obviously, the fee freeze announced in June will not apply to providers that have withdrawn. Parents have no option but to pay because childcare spaces are so scarce in the area.”
“We will have an airline lobby that is never happy and we will have incessant calls to expand and expand, with the airlines knowing that if they paint Ireland in an unsavoury light, they will get their way. We are enshrining corporate bullying of the State in our law. That is embarrassing and it is the cherry on top of what is fundamentally a regressive and bad policy.”
“Finally - and this is frankly pathetic - this Bill provides an open invitation for airlines to bully the Government and talk down Ireland if they perceive that there is some inhibitor to their commercial interests in Dublin. Section 25 gives licence to the Minister to change planning conditions where they are perceived to be potentially damaging to "the international reputation of the State in respect of air transport". This is extremely open ended and essentially unfalsifiable. There is no objective standard for reputational damage, no evidence threshold, no definition. The provision could be invoked on the basis of adverse commentary from Michael O'Leary, a familiar noise to all of us. What do we think will happen here?”
“Irish people spend more abroad than tourists spend here, so more flights actually takes more money out of the country than it brings in. Research shows this and it undermines the Government's claim that aviation expansion is an unqualified economic benefit. The serious international evidence shows that the relationship between airport size and national prosperity is far weaker than that assumption and that the environmental and health costs of unrestrained growth are not some marginal externality to be waved away. They are large enough, on a comparable European analysis, to turn an apparently pro-growth decision into a net loss for the country as a whole.”
“The analysis found that environmental and noise measures, including a higher distance-based flight tax, delivered considerably greater broad welfare benefits than a blunt capacity restriction does, precisely because pricing instruments let you target the noisiest, most polluting, longest haul flights rather than cutting capacity indiscriminately. The lesson, then, is not that caps are the only available tool; it is that doing nothing and simply lifting the cap with no replacement mechanism, as the Government is doing here, is the worst of all options. Reducing flights or pricing their environmental cost properly can deliver a net gain for society. Unlimited expansion, on this evidence, risks a net loss. What is more is that we have a persistent travel deficit in this country.”
“The most salient finding of this report, however, is that the aviation sector losses are dwarfed by the climate gains. In other words, restraint on flight numbers does not just reduce harm: on the Dutch evidence, it produces a net welfare gain once climate costs are properly priced in, even after aviation sector losses are accounted for. This study also acknowledges that capacity caps are not the only option. It refers to a cost-benefit analysis of the options available to Schiphol, tellingly titled "Shrink or become sustainable?".”
“Broad welfare, for the benefit of this House, is a framework that goes beyond GDP to capture economic output. It looks at employment, health, housing, noise, nature and climate all together, precisely the kind of holistic accounting that this Government has failed to apply to its own decision on Dublin Airport. The findings are instructive, and I seriously encourage the Minister to examine the report. The study found that even a substantially smaller Schiphol, with 250,000 flights, barely half of today's traffic, could still preserve a large majority of the connectivity that Dutch travellers actually use because the destinations that disappear are disproportionately sustained by transfer passengers rather than Dutch residents. The extra journey time imposed on the average traveller was measured in minutes, not hours.”
“There is no definition in this Bill. Does it mean routes to specific destinations, frequency of services, the number of carriers or some other aggregate measures? We know we live on an island and we know we do not want to be stranded here but how much connectivity is enough? This approach to connectivity is just like the Government's approach to the unmitigated expansion of data centres. How much is enough? If the Minister is basing his decision on international connectivity, it would be helpful to know what the actual metric is. On the economic case, I point the Minister to a study commissioned by the social council for Schiphol Airport. It examined what would happen to broad welfare under three different scenarios for the size of the airport in terms of flight numbers.”
“A ruling in the Hague District Court in 2024 stated that the Dutch Government had acted unlawfully in failing to protect residents near Schiphol Airport from noise pollution, breaching Article 8 of the ECHR, and ordered the Government to provide practical and effective protections to those affected. The same protections under Article 8 apply to residents here, and further protections apply under Article 40.3 of our own Constitution, which obliges the State to protect the property rights of every citizen. The assessment provisions in this Bill are unlikely to meet even the basic common law obligations to consult those whose rights are affected. I referred earlier to the Minister making decisions on this cap based on economic interests and international connectivity. Can the Minister please define "international connectivity"?”
“Will it be farmers who are asked to pick up the slack, those in the transport sector or regular households, many of whom are already doing their best to be environmentally conscious? It is households in the Minister's own constituency who will feel the impact of this move most immediately by virtue of the fact that they live under the flight paths. The consequences here are being pushed further downstream to the local planning authority, which can fiddle with planning conditions but cannot touch the one lever that actually matters: the number of aircraft flying overhead. We have seen where this can lead us.”
“If this Government proceeds with an assessment framework that does not capture the full climate footprint of additional flights, arrivals and departures, carbon dioxide and non-carbon dioxide effects alike, it is inviting a legal challenge that, on the weight of recent European jurisprudence, it stands a real chance of losing. Exempting the Minister from section 15 of the climate Act does not make the climate consequences disappear; it defers them and it leaves even less room to manoeuvre for every future Minister, planning authority and local councillor, who will all have to find emissions reductions elsewhere to compensate for the growth this Bill will unleash. We are still waiting to hear from the Minister on where the equivalent emissions reductions will come from.”
“It is literally written into the Bill that he can simply ignore such assessments. It is a fait accompli . However, we have clear jurisprudence from several different courts, including the ECHR and the UK Supreme Court, that environmental impact assessments for high-emitting projects must comprehensively assess downstream combustion emissions, must look at scopes 1, 2 and 3 emissions and must be grounded in the best available science. The cases in the rulings of these courts involve fossil fuel extraction but the logic applies equally to a project that will materially increase aviation emissions into the future.”
“I am sure a copy of that report has been shared with the Minister. Not only are we risking our climate, but the Government is also actively risking public funds in litigation that this analysis tells us is entirely foreseeable. The Minister has relied on the environmental impact assessment provisions as a way of getting around the climate argument. He knows well that this is a wholly inadequate framework for assessing the climate impact of this decision. As section 15 of the 2015 Act will not apply, any environmental impact assessment carried out under this Bill cannot properly account for the national transition objective or our greenhouse gas mitigation obligations. In any case, are we really to believe that an environmental impact assessment will throw up something that will make the Minister reverse course on this?”
“The Dutch Supreme Court found likewise in the Urgenda Foundation case and the International Court of Justice, in its advisory opinion last year, confirmed that states must use all means at their disposal to prevent harm from greenhouse gas emissions, including, expressly, emissions from fossil fuel consumption, which includes aviation fuel. A legal analysis of the passenger cap removal commissioned by Opportunity Green and prepared by barrister Tim Johnston of Brick Court Chambers sets out plainly that Ireland, already behind in our own targets and comparable countries and already in breach of climate commitments, is exposed to a credible claim that lifting this cap, while simultaneously excepting the decision from climate scrutiny, constitutes a breach of Article 8 of the ECHR.”
“People will understandably start to question why they should bother when those at the top are not only allowed to continue to pollute on a massive scale, but are actually being facilitated to increase their emissions. This is a bowing down to corporate interests and greed dressed up in the language of connectivity and competitiveness. This is not just a moral failing; it is a legal one too. Notwithstanding the disapplication of our own climate laws, under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, the State has a positive obligation to protect its citizens from the foreseeable harms of the climate crisis. I do not mean that in an abstract sense. The European Court of Human Rights found exactly this in the recent KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz case against Switzerland.”