Michael McDowell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I understand where the Senator is coming from. She has been single-minded in pursuit of decarbonisation and in her opposition to the continued use of fossil fuels. To go back to the remarks on the previous amendment, I found the Irish Academy of Engineering analysis quite helpful to my understanding of the matter. I do not think that body was trying to mislead me in any way. Members of the Government parties, or some of them at any rate, support the LNG terminal. Whether they are right or wrong, to do so is another matter - but they are there. There is a legitimate point of view to be expressed.

When it came to that LNG terminal, it appeared the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, was quite prepared to have storage facilities for gas in Ireland as long as they were publicly owned. I do not know what the rights and wrongs of that are either, but he seemed to have an ideological objection to any private construction of these facilities and required them to be built by the State. Bearing in mind how long everything the State does takes, I would prefer, at the very least, to see an absolute guarantee that if such a terminal and storage facility is necessary that it be built quickly. Some of the sluggish rate of progress in public infrastructure investment is just breathtaking.

I will say one last thing on the tobacco convention. I agree with the gist of it in that we have to square up to people who are using every device and, from time to time, the legal system, to throw spanners in the works regarding the danger posed by tobacco consumption. I fully agree with that. I will, however, put one matter on the record of the House. The convention has been taken to such an extent that people who are engaged as tobacconists and are entitled to sell as such, and who want to make representations to the relevant Department about whether cigarettes can be sold in packets of 30, which is now the case in Ireland more than other places, or about the size of packets in which cigarettes can be legally sold, now find that the convention operates to the extent that the Departments in question will not even respond to their letters, even to inform them those letters have gone into a wastepaper basket. Whether cigarettes are sold in packs of 20 or 30 is something on which tobacconists - I am not talking about an alliance of retail sellers of tobacco products but corner-store alliances that have a view on this issue - are now in the position whereby they cannot even be heard by a Department. Their views cannot even be entertained due to that particular convention. That seems an over-zealous application of its terms. Due to the looseness of the language used in the convention regarding tobacconists, they were considered part of the tobacco industry because they were involved in the selling of tobacco. All they were trying to do, however, was to engage with the Department on why people were selling cigarettes in packets of 30 to a far greater extent in this State than is happening in the United Kingdom, and whether that was a good or bad thing in terms of overall consumption of tobacco products as opposed to the sale of cigarettes in packets of 20.

Having said all those things, I do not know whether I agree with the Senator that the fossil fuel industry should be made so anathema that no Department of State can even talk to it about anything or whether that is a good idea. No matter who is in government in this country, we will be dependent on natural gas, as a back-up or whatever, for the next 25 years. Nobody really disputes that. We need something. Unless we have nuclear power or something else, we will be dependent on natural gas, as a back-up at the very least, for the next generation. To introduce into law a provision that no Department of State can have anything to do with, or can receive any lobbying by, anybody involved in the supply of that fossil fuel is pushing things a little too far.