Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I want to tell the Minister of State at the outset that his colleague, Deputy Matthews, who is a major railway advocate, has challenged me to try out the train. I have done so a few times, including today, and will do so again tomorrow. I am glad to admit that it works. I still travel to Dublin by car some days but it takes ten or 15 minutes to cycle to the train station and an hour and 50 minutes on the train. I get through a lot of emails, have an apple and a mug of tea and come off the train refreshed before cycling into the city. I encourage everyone to try it. It does not work every day and there are some pitfalls to this form of travel. I am dreading the day the clouds open up and it pours rain on me. I will have quite a miserable day in Dublin when that happens. However, I am happy to say on the record of the Dáil that this new way of getting to work in Dublin from County Clare works, by bicycle and with a lot of help from Irish Rail, and I am happy to embrace it into the future. The Acting Chairman might see me peddling away from here in a while. Perhaps some day he will take his bike and we can cycle together through his constituency on my way to the station.

This is very progressive legislation that sets an objective for the Government and the nation of achieving climate neutrality by 2050, with an interim target of a 51% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2023 relative to the 2018 baseline. It sets out a number of key provisions, including annual climate action plans, five-year climate action strategies, five-year carbon budgets, sector-specific ceilings and a national adaptation framework. Since the legislation was drafted, we have had really groundbreaking news in County Clare regarding the green Atlantic project to develop colossal offshore wind energy capacity off the coast of counties Clare and Kerry. The project involves a partnership approach by the ESB and Equinor, a private company. It has breathed huge life and hope back into our county. We have been looking at a cliff edge for far too long, with Moneypoint slowly winding down its coal-burning capacity and transitioning to we did not know what. There has been uncertainty for the Moneypoint workers and the economy of the county in not knowing what was happening. We now have a future pathway. However, it is important the county is not forgotten about in terms of the just transition. It will take five years or so to get to our wind energy goal. There will be tough days for the community and the workforce at Moneypoint as we move from the coal-burning phase to wind energy. That needs to be taken into consideration.

There is huge potential along the Shannon Estuary for tidal energy electricity generation. I understand that potential is being explored. I visited the University of Limerick a year or two ago to see one of the testing devices being developed there. That technology has been embraced by other countries. The tidal differential coming into the Shannon Estuary is quite significant. It offers a way by which we could be generating guaranteed electricity every day of the year. That potential needs to be explored. In the context of the infrastructural overhaul taking place in west Clare and along the estuary, we definitely need to be looking at tidal energy as well.

I implore the Minister of State to move ahead with finalising the new wind energy guidelines, which were published by the Government in draft format in December 2019. A hell of a lot has happened since then, including a general election and the Covid crisis. The guidelines need to be properly ratified and issued to all local authorities. In their absence, we are left dealing with guidelines dating back, I understand, to 2006 or 2008. They are totally antiquated and do not reflect where the infrastructure and the whole sector is at now. More importantly for communities, they do not give adequate protection to people who are living their lives peacefully. We have had a number of applications put in haste through the planning process in Clare County Council in anticipation of the new wind guidelines. There is one in my home parish of Parteen that has gone up in breach of planning. That is totally wrong. We must strive for the production of renewable energy but we cannot suddenly start lowering the bar and allowing projects to go in willy-nilly. It is an affront to communities not to follow the best planning process. The sooner we get the new guidelines in place the better.

This year marks 96 years since construction of the ESB's station at Ardnacrusha got under way. It is an incredible facility located in my home parish. It was once the largest generating plant in Ireland but now contributes only some 1% of all electricity generated and pushed onto the national grid. It is nearly a century old and was called the seventh wonder of the engineering world when it was first developed. It will continue to operate, although perhaps not for electricity generation for now, and to have a very important role in controlling the Shannon waterway. The Government needs to look at ways of increasing the output at Ardnacrusha. The turbines are not always turned on and the service offered is quite intermittent. It is operated remotely at the moment but there is potential for increased capacity. Nothing much has changed there. The demand for electricity has increased hugely, however, and Ardnacrusha can contribute more to the national grid. I implore then Minister of State to look into it.

A number of years ago, when I was a Clare county councillor, I was one of a number of councillors who fully backed proposals that our county become fracking-free. We were the first local authority in the country to do so and, six or seven weeks later, the Government declared that Ireland would become a fracking-free country. We now have a very difficult situation, as articulated by Deputy Nash, where LNG plants are still lingering around and we are not sure how they are being treated. That is not accounted for in this legislation and the Government needs to be clearer in this regard. We may be a fracking-free country but where do we stand on imported fracked gas? We have a position on it, as declared by Government when the terms of the programme for Government were being negotiated. That position needs to be enshrined in law and made very clear to the public. We in County Clare have understood the importance of this for many years ago because of our karst landscape in the Burren. When you start drilling down into deep rock, you interfere with aquifers and the underground water system. That is unhealthy, unsafe and environmentally unsound.

On forestry, there are far too few native tress being planted. We need to look at increasing the threshold and obligation on new forestry applications. The existing threshold is way too low. In my county of Clare, I am part of a group that is leading an initiative to reintroduce the native sessile oak to Cratloe Woods. Those trees are very special and there are very few of them left. Anyone looking at proceedings in the Houses of Parliament in Westminster will see a roof over Boris Johnson's head that was built with oak out of Cratloe Woods. Yet, if one goes up to those woods these days, it is conifer, spruce and Scots pine all over the place. We need to get back to this heritage variety of tree that was native to Ireland. Those trees built the hull of HMS Victory, the Royal Palace of Amsterdam and the roof of the Palace of Westminster. We need to get back those native species and move towards heritage forestry. There are parts of the country, especially uphill and upland areas, that are conducive to conifers, spruce trees and straight-pole timber, but there are other parts, Cratloe Woods being one, where we need to look at native species of trees.

On the matter of damage to the environment, I want to raise the issue of waste water output.

Doonbeg got a great announcement yesterday from the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, but there are other villages in Clare, such as Broadford, Carrigaholt, Cooraclare and Doolin, where waste water gets flushed down the toilet, goes out into soakaway gravel pits or septic tanks and, in many cases, is discharged directly into lakes, rivers or the open sea. That practice must end. Irrespective of party politics or who is in government, I have often wondered whether this problem is fully understood in Dublin and urban Ireland. In small rural communities, every drop of sewerage goes out into the open landscape when you flush the toilet. It goes into the water supply that people will drink later that day, following a filtration process. There is something askew and wrong with that.

The Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, has dual briefs relating to the environment and transport. I implore him to push back at every opportunity against suggestions that aviation taxes be imposed on the carbon output of airplanes. Aer Lingus, through its parent group International Airlines Group, IAG, has invested in 142 carbon-efficient aircraft. Ryanair has a plan to spend €20 billion on 210 new aircraft. We need to be kind to these industries and certainly do not need to be putting more impediments and barriers in their way as we try to get airplanes back in the sky.

This is positive legislation. There are other aspects of how Ireland embraces climate change, beyond legislation, that need refinement. When I left home this morning, 6 May, I noticed the windscreen of my wife's car was covered in frost and ice. Let the Healy-Raes or anyone who says climate change is not happening look at my social media pages this evening where they will see me scraping ice off my wife's car in the driveway with a credit card. Climate change does exist and is very real. The seasons are totally out of sync. We have an opportunity to do the right thing by the environment now for ourselves and the generations to come after us, and that starts with this legislation.

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