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

It is my position. As Minister, I have to look at all three. As policymakers, we must all do so.

Climate must come first because there is the physical reality that we cannot avoid the risk of passing various tipping points. We have to stay within certain limits. Those limits are set by physics and the meteorological system. They cannot vary. There is a real limit on the environmental side. When it comes to providing security or competitiveness, there are always a variety of different ways by which that can be done, for example, by being more efficient, switching to renewables and looking at a range of different strategies. In my mind, it is the case that the sustainability criteria within the trilemma does have pre-eminence.

If you look at what has been done in the past year in response to the energy security problems we did have, you can see that the real benefit is that we are delivering new additional backup power that complements our move towards a zero-carbon system. I refer to power generation at the North Wall, in Aghada, Shannonbridge, Tarbert and by all the projects we legislated for here on an emergency development basis. We are building those and we are delivering them. You do not ignore security; you have to provide for it. That is being done by means of the actions to which I refer.

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