Niall Ó Donnghaile (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Teamwork makes the dream work.

The Minister is very welcome. Before I get into the content of the annual transition statement, I would like the record to reflect why we are here in 2022 discussing the statement from 2020. There are legal obligations upon the Minister compelling him to be here under the Climate and Low Carbon Development Act 2015. According to section 14(1), an annual transition statement shall be presented to each House of the Oireachtas not later than each anniversary of the passing of the Act. That Act was passed on 10 December 2015. In a very orderly and lawful manner, an annual transition statement was laid before the Houses every December between 2016 and 2019, but in 2020 the deadline came and went without the annual transition statement.

Despite the legal obligations on the Minister, it was reported in the IrishIndependentthat the Minister did not propose to prepare an annual transition statement for 2020. In effect, the Minister was simply choosing what parts of the law he would like to follow. Such a brazen disregard for climate obligations was quite stunning and a worrying precedent to set for subsequent Ministers responsible for climate action.

It simply would not do for the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, to shirk his responsibility. After significant political pressure, he outlined in response to a parliamentary question, which was requested by my colleague Senator Boylan, that he intended to publish the statement by the end of 2021. Even though he was setting a deadline 12 months after the statutory deadline, this was a welcome U-turn. Unfortunately, that deadline was also missed, and the Climate Change Advisory Council rightfully reprimanded the Government in its annual review of the Government's climate efforts at the end of 2021. Then, at a meeting of the Joint Committee on the Environment and Climate Action in January 2022, a Department official told Senator Boylan it would be published by the end of March. Finally, on 10 June, we saw the annual transition statement, 547 days after the due date. It is a worrying precedent. We know that climate commitments are not worth the paper they are written on unless they are adhered to. If the Minister is casual about his obligations, how seriously can he expect other Ministers to take their legal commitments?

Now I would like to turn to the content of the annual transition statement. In the past, such statements have been criticised by the Climate Change Advisory Council for failing "to provide a balanced and coherent overview of the progress of the sectors, tending to highlight the positives, and under-emphasise measures where there are data gaps or challenges." Unfortunately, this year is no different.

One of the most glaring inconsistencies in climate policy is the drive for more and more data centres, yet data centres are mentioned only once in the statement. Data centres place a massive burden on our energy system through their insatiable demand for more and more generation capacity. The previous Fine Gael Government rolled out the red carpet for data centres. It sought to make Ireland, especially Dublin, the data centre capital of the world, with very little thought given to the impact this would have on our electricity supply or carbon emissions. Despite our more ambitious climate targets and the increased threat of electricity blackouts, the current Government has not changed its approach sufficiently. Data centres now use as much electricity as all the homes in rural Ireland combined. Their consumption is set to at least double by 2030. As a result of a failure to get a handle on supply and demand for electricity, including from data centres, the State is set to spend €350 million on new gas-powered generators. That is policy incoherence plain and simple, but it barely even gets a mention in the statement.

Reports from the Environmental Protection Agency tell us what we know already. The gap between stated ambition and actual emissions reductions continues to widen. Total greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to have increased by 6% in 2021 rather than to have decreased by the required 4.8%, as per the Climate Change Advisory Council's carbon budgets. The years 2019 and 2020 were supposed to be points of inflection, where we finally started getting a handle on the problem. However, we are still very far from that point. Earlier this year, the head of the EPA said emissions are again unlikely to fall in 2022. We are a good part of the way through the first carbon budget period and we are still pressing full steam ahead. I do not say all this to score political points, because it is in everyone's interest to meet the climate targets so we will have a liveable climate; rather, I say it in the political sense because each missed target only makes the path the next Government has to climb that bit steeper.

Our energy sector has huge potential to deliver significant carbon savings. Sinn Féin has called for an acceleration in the delivery of renewables, especially offshore wind and green hydrogen, and for the removal of barriers to solar, such as the prohibition on direct lines crossing roads and red tape preventing schools from installing solar. We need to speed up the process for wind generation. The Government can fully resource the agencies involved, such as An Bord Pleanála, EirGrid and the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU.

At the same time, we need adequate resourcing for our marine planning departments, the National Parks and Wildlife Service, NPWS, and environmental NGOs so biodiversity is not unduly damaged in the race for offshore wind turbines. We are in a twin crisis of climate and biodiversity. We need to deliver on carbon budgets and protect our biodiversity, getting the balance right such that biodiversity will not be the sacrificial lamb of climate action.

There are many opportunities in this transition to make our society better. We need to bring people along with us, and that is why Sinn Féin believes the just transition is not just a bonus add-on to climate action but that it must be front and centre. We need to protect workers whose livelihoods will be affected by the transition and build a new sustainable economy around principles of community wealth building rather than just extraction. There will be no transition if it is not just.