Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

It is important to bear in mind that keeping the lights on is an important immediate policy aim and obligation of government. Whatever one might say about long-term strategy, and I intend to say a few words about that too, keeping the lights on on an emergency basis is an imperative for government. We have to be practical in how we achieve that aim.

On the long-term strategy, Senator Dooley will recall that five, six or seven years ago, at the joint committee that dealt with energy at the time, I consistently demanded of SEAI witnesses and departmental witnesses, how our long-term demand, as they saw it, was to be reconciled with the policy of attracting data centres to Ireland. I was flannelled and so was the committee by evasive nonsense where people would not admit that there was a complete incongruity at the heart of public policy at the time and that ploughing ahead regardless was not a sustainable course of action. It was well known that the Department with responsibility for energy and communications - these were in a single bundle of departmental responsibility - and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment had radically different approaches which they decided to sweep under the carpet and not address. The result of that has been that the increased demand by large-scale energy users, coupled with a massively growing population in Ireland, meant that our energy requirements in the medium term would expand rather than contract. At the time, the SEAI was on a different intellectual trajectory, talking about reducing energy demand. These things just did not add up. I remember that the current Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, was a member of that committee. It struck me at the time that he was not sufficiently vocal on that matter and did not support the positions I was taking. He seemed to be very happy that Apple would come and all the rest of it. He seemed to be relaxed about these developments. He now knows we are in a different situation.

The Minister, Deputy Ryan, consistently argues that offshore wind development is the answer to nearly all our problems and that, coupled with developing hydrogen energy conversion methods, we should not merely be self-sufficient but should become an energy exporter in the foreseeable future. All that would be fine if anything was being done about it but we are still at the stage where the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, MARA, the agency that is supposed to licence offshore development, is getting its act together in the recruitment of officers and executives to commence the licensing procedure later this year. That is the sad situation we are in, two and a half years into the life of this Government. We cannot escape the truth that if offshore wind power was the great solution to all our problems and was urgently needed to comply with our climate change aims, the implementation of the process whereby deep offshore floating or fixed platforms can be constructed in the appropriate places in Ireland is hopelessly behind schedule. That is a part of the administrative paralysis which has characterised our approach to this matter, let alone the administrative failure to tell the truth at the time, as I referred to earlier.

A third issue that has arisen here is that legislation was brought through - I think by the Minister, Deputy Ryan - envisaging that An Bord Pleanála would be the agency to determine objections and issues of planning sustainability in respect of offshore wind farms.He assured this House quite recently that An Bord Pleanála was now going to start recruiting people with some expertise in this area. Let us remember that An Bord Pleanála has had to defer simple consideration of railways projects for want of resources and time. It is snowed under with work. It has had an internal, domestic debacle. We are now in the situation that we are going to create a new area of activity for An Bord Pleanála to deal with the ecological or environmental aspects of licences granted by the MARA process to people who are willing to invest in offshore development in Ireland. We have not made the decisions about ports to service them. We have not implemented the network decisions necessary to sustain all this. We have done nothing.

This particular legislation is all the more necessary because of the complete absence of strategic thinking on the part of Government and the absolute indolence and paralysis that has characterised facing up to a few simple facts. One of them is that for the next five to ten years we will need fossil fuel backup, unfortunately. The British Government is today reactivating coal-fired stations to meet its targets. Our gas importation is at the moment, apparently, safe, even though it all goes through one particular location in Scotland. Luckily, Norwegian and North Sea gas supplies seem to be unaffected by the current international crisis. As long as that is the case, gas would or should be our fallback in respect of avoiding brownouts and the like.

We have to say as well that it has been obvious that we need extra fossil fuel technology and infrastructure to deal with the coming five to ten years. It has been obvious to everybody. There has been all this dithering about liquified natural gas, LNG, and whether it is a good or a bad thing, who should own it and the like. Again, all of that should have been put in place two years ago. Whatever the decision, whether it is to be State-owned or privately developed, that decision could have been made two years ago and the infrastructure could have been built by now. We did not do it.

In the midst of all of this, we are closing down Derrybrien on a legally mistaken basis. That has the capacity to keep 30,000 homes functioning when there is wind. It is unnecessary. There is a way out that complies with European law and that denies developers the benefit of their development.

Where I have a significantly different perspective from Senator Higgins is in this: what we do in this country is important in terms of its international demonstration effect but it is not really that important in terms of the future of the planet. Those who argue that what happens in Ireland is crucial to saving glaciers simply do not understand. Decisions being made in other parts of the world as we speak, things happening in respect of methane output in central Asia and other places at the same time as we are debating this, in global terms mean that those who think this particular Bill is going to accelerate the melting of glaciers as an isolated proposition are simply wrong. Therefore, I come back to the point I made at the beginning. We must avoid brownouts. We cannot be an economy that goes into temporary paralysis due to lack of joined-up thinking over the past five and seven years. Previous Ministers and their Departments, not just this Minister, must bear responsibility for failing to address these issues five and seven years ago when it was plain that we were paddling our canoe towards the Niagara Falls in terms of our capacity to comply with the obligations we have undertaken internationally to meet climate change targets.