Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

As I said, I have spoken to amendment No. 17, which provides that health and safety measures should be accounted for during disconnection, decommissioning or repurposing of pipelines given that in construction and in use are not the only states in which a pipe can exist. Health and safety, therefore, needs to be taken into account.

Amendment No. 19 gives the CRU the power that it "may" rather than "must" refuse consent for the construction of any new distribution or transmission pipeline in a particular geographic area, again, to be consistent with the carbon budget programme and sectoral emissions ceilings. It is worth highlighting the need for both gas demand reduction and emissions reduction. There is a risk that a reference only to decarbonisation or emissions reductions would open up only using green hydrogen and allowing the network to expand. We are all in agreement that green hydrogen is showing great promise in terms of decarbonisation, but we should be using green hydrogen for those difficult-to-decarbonise industries, not ones that could of course be fuelled by renewable energy. As I said, this gives the power to the CRU to refuse consent for the construction of distribution or transmission pipelines.