Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Fair play to Deputy Bríd Smith and Solidarity-People Before Profit for bringing the Bill before the House. The Bill gives a clear signal of intent and proposes real actions that will help to achieve our carbon emissions obligations. We must view this against the backdrop that we are at the bottom of the pile. It is a great little country for ignoring targets to which it has signed up. In that context the Bill makes sense by preventing the renewal of licences for exploration which would tie us into long-term commitments to fossil fuels at a time when we have committed to divesting from them. It is absolute lunacy. Some of these frontier licences are quite complex and can run for up to 12 years.

This Bill is necessary to stop the lunacy we saw when the Minister issued a licence to Providence Resources Plc to drill off the west coast of Ireland a week after the House voted to ban onshore fracking. It is disgraceful. We are now tied to that commitment up to 2020 in the naivety of thinking that offshore fracking is less damaging than fracking onshore. The blasts from oil and gas exploration are clearly a daily threat to Ireland's dolphin, whale and porpoise population. They also kill approximately 64% of zooplankton, a vital resource for the entire marine ecosystem, not to mention the damage that can occur from oil spills and the like.

Bills such as this give us an opportunity to turn our performance around and become a forerunner in some of these areas. The task ahead is huge and that is because we have ignored it up to now. There is no doubt that we must start quickly improving. The Government does not have a clear strategy on how to pursue our climate change policies. Rather, it is giving out many mixed signals on the issue. The Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment considers many issues. There have been many publications and draft plans but no clear methodology for how targets will be met. Meanwhile, other Ministers have come up with very specific targets for increases in agricultural output and the size of the national herd, incentivising the development of energy-intensive industries, such as those involving data centres and so on, that fly in the face our international obligations on climate action. The Bill is a step in the right direction. If the Government wishes to embrace what it states are its policies, it should welcome the Bill with open arms.

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