Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

As Hurricane Lorenzo careers towards this country, we have further evidence of the greater frequency of extreme weather events and of what the scientists tell us are the results of climate change. The Taoiseach says he wants to do something about that. However, this week - I want to ask if this was discussed at the environment committee - the Government is going to put forward a liquid natural gas terminal, which will cost hundreds of millions, to be built on the Shannon Estuary as a project of common interest on a list for the European Union to import fracked gas, potentially locking this country in to the use of fossil fuels and dirty, dangerous fracked gas from the United States for decades to come. That is being done without the approval having been discussed at the joint committee or here in this House. It is absolutely outrageous. As we speak, there are people here from Pennsylvania and other parts of the United States who have come to give testament to the extraordinary pollution, damage and adverse health effects that have been inflicted on the people of Pennsylvania and elsewhere from this fracked gas. Mark Ruffalo, the actor, has been tweeting all week appealing to the Government not to approve this terminal because of the damage to human health and the environment fracking is doing in the United States. We banned fracking in this country because we did not want those effects in our countryside. Do we think simultaneously that it is okay to inflict them on the people of the United States for a so-called transitional fuel which in actuality is every bit as dangerous for global warming as carbon dioxide when we take into account methane leakage?

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