Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I rise to support Deputy Boyd Barrett's amendment. Deputy Wallace is right. There were complications in my mind last week as to how we would work that because there were complications with other exploration areas, in terms of oil and coal and other seams, which was difficult. I asked how it would work. That, to an extent, explains one of the reasons why we put down this amendment, the purpose of which is to provide for all offshore exploration, which is a way of overcoming those technical difficulties between what might be fracking and what might be petroleum exploration. As Deputy Wallace says, the two are often combined. The way we have addressed that is by putting forward the amendment here.

We need to stop extracting fossil fuels out of the ground. We need to do that for local environmental reasons, in regard to polluting the water course and a range of other effects, but we also need to protect our atmosphere. On that basis, we have to keep four-fifths of the known fossil fuels underground. We do not go offshore. We have plenty of our own resources onshore in renewable power that we can turn to. On that basis, we support the amendment.

We also support the call to intervene with the North-South Ministerial council. For all our talk about offshore, the bigger immediate risk is that a Northern Ireland administration will continue fracking there. There are licences which exist in the North which we believe need to be closed and we should apply political pressure on an all-island basis to stop fracking in the North at the same time that we ban it here.

See this speech in context