Mick Wallace (Wexford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The debate that happened here last week was a little disappointing. We saw our amendments criticised by the Government, the Greens, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, all under pressure to get the Bill through the House in one hour and 20 minutes. As I said last week, I do not believe that the Government has any genuine interest in tackling climate change and the record of terrible planning and the prevalence of one-off housing has more to do with this Bill being passed than any genuine concern about the advance of climate change. NIMBYism has not gone away.

Last week the Minister of State said that it was inappropriate to introduce statutory prohibitions that are not underpinned by scientific rationale and place Ireland at an unfair competitive disadvantage by creating the uncertainty of limiting the operators' capability to assess reservoirs in the Irish offshore. This was the Government's main argument put forward against our amendments, so let us examine this statement for a moment. The fracking Bill put forward by the Government introduces a statutory prohibition of onshore fracking. According to the Minister of State's logic, banning fracking must be underpinned by scientific rationale. In terms of the scientific rationale of banning fracking offshore, which our amendment aims to do, the Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, and others in the Chamber seem to be under the illusion that fracking is not carried out offshore. This was discussed on Committee Stage and when Deputy Eamon Ryan asked if fracking offshore existed, the Minister of State said that the only use of fracking in the petroleum sector was when they hit a stubborn section of the core and they frack it to shatter the rock in order to ease the continuation of the drilling.

However, there is more to it than that. Leaving aside the fact that in order to battle against climate change disaster, banning any practice relating to the extraction of fossil fuels should be a priority, this statement by the Minister of State is not entirely true. In 2015, documents obtained by al-Jazeera America revealed that the world's largest oil firms are now fracking in some of the Gulf's deepest waters. The fracking that the Minister of State, Deputy Kyne, is talking about is dubbed "frac packing" and has been used offshore for decades and employs high pressurised water, gravel, and chemicals to clear sand from the opening of the well and facilitate the flow of fossil fuels. Federal officials have now acknowledged, in written statements to al-Jazeera, that a more expansive type of fracking involving higher fluid volumes and extending longer distances from the well bore are being used in the Gulf of Mexico. Environmental observers in California obtained a list of chemicals used at 12 offshore fracking sites off its coast. Almost all the substances cause damage to organs in the human body, and there are claims that fracking offshore can increase the risk of an oil spill as well as air and water pollution. It might not affect the people in County Leitrim but it will affect the people on the Galway coast if we damage the waters with something like that out in the Atlantic.

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