Brian Leddin (Limerick City, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to speak following the European Council meeting the week before last. On the mind of everybody in this House, as well as across the country and across Europe, is the energy crisis. That crisis is leading to a very severe cost-of-living crisis that is making life difficult for our people. Our short-term challenge is solving the energy crisis. This has already been spoken about in the House today and on many previous occasions in recent weeks and months.

I want to talk about the medium- and long-term energy crisis. There has been some debate about that but I do not think there has been enough debate or that it has been good enough. There is a tendency from many commentators to double down on some of the technologies and solutions of the past. Those solutions may have served us well but, especially given the publication of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changereport on Monday, of which colleagues will be aware, we do not have any time to lose in transitioning to a clean energy economy. Ireland has vast renewable energy resources off our coasts, particularly the west coast. If we put our minds to it and if we seek the help of Europe, we can provide ten times as much energy as we will ever need. We can satisfy our domestic need and we can help Europe get off its addiction to Russian fossil fuels. This is the medium and long-term challenge that we must follow.

We are at a fork in the road. The Ceann Comhairle and the Minister of State will probably appreciate me quoting Robert Frost:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

We are at the fork in the road. We are looking at the path diverging and we have a choice. Will we do what we did in the 1970s during the oil crisis? We built a coal-fired power station, unlike the Danes, who invested heavily in renewable energy. That was quite a new concept at the time. Now, because they did that in the 1970s, the Danes have a €10 billion industry. They got behind the Germans, the Spanish and the Americans to some extent. Ireland played it safe and built a coal-fired power station, and now we are in a very challenging situation. We should not make the same mistake again.

We have an opportunity to be world leaders and innovators. We are innovators in many sectors and we can be innovators in the development of offshore wind technology, including both floating and fixed technology. To make this work, we have to develop a green hydrogen economy. This is not a technological challenge but a societal and economic one. We have to be the first to do it. We should do it because we have the energy - more clean energy than nearly any other country. While the solution for many countries across Europe and the world might be LNG or nuclear power, these are not the solutions for Ireland. Ireland has a clear and clean path that it can follow. If we speak to Europe, and to the European need for clean energy, and ask for help to scale up, escalate and expedite the delivery of clean energy from the western flank of Europe, we can get there much more quickly than we had planned heretofore.

Let us be under no illusion that it is a huge challenge but it is the right path and the one we should follow.

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