Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I want to raise the matter of the Energy Charter Treaty. The Minister for the Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, announced last Friday that he would not grant a lease undertaking for the oil and gas prospecting due to happen off the Cork coast. This is, of course, the right decision. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, has said we can have no new oil or gas fields and that no more exploration should be conducted if we are to have any chance of staying under the 1.5°C target for warming. However, it has now been confirmed in the newspapers that the 20% shareholder in the Barryroe oil project, Lansdowne Oil & Gas, a British company, has decided to initiate legal proceedings under the Energy Charter Treaty against the State. It is seeking to sue Ireland for $100 million. I have repeatedly flagged that the Energy Charter Treaty is a toxic treaty and a relic of the past, that investor–state dispute settlement, ISDS, has no place in the legal system and that we have our courts, which are independent, yet I have been stonewalled by the Government. There has been no risk assessment of energy policy in this country and how exposed we are under the treaty. Multiple European countries have announced that they are going to withdraw from the treaty, yet Ireland continues to obfuscate and state it will hang on and see whether it can be reformed. Now the chickens are coming home to roost because this is the first time that Ireland has been sued under the ISDS mechanism. It will not be the last because, as we know and as the IPCC has flagged, fossil fuel companies are using the treaty to put citizens on the hook for their stranded assets because they know their days are numbered.