Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

Sure, to report progress. That is fine.

Amendment No. 27 seeks to delete section 46(9). This subsection, very worryingly, suggests that entire classes of offshore service vessels may be exempted from requirements to comply with any provision of the rules. This provision is particularly concerning in the context of offshore service vessels that may be involved in the construction, maintenance and servicing of offshore LNG facilities.

Amendment No. 28 is an alternative to amendment No. 27 and seeks to amend section 46(9) to ensure that exemptions from offshore vessels and IP rules cannot be extended to any rules that are necessary to implement the provisions of chapter XV of SOLAS and the IP code.

Amendment No. 29 seeks to achieve the same thing as amendment No. 28 but with a different wording.

Amendment No. 30 seeks to amend section 46(9) to ensure that offshore services involved in industrial activity related to the hydrocarbon energy sector shall not be exempted from requirements to comply with offshore service vessels and IP rules.

This subsection basically says we can exempt entire categories of offshore service vessels from all the rules we may put in place. We can decide there is a whole kind of vessel that will just not have any rules applied to it such that those vessels have a blanket exemption. This is in a context of our record of accidents in the State and the failures in Cork and elsewhere in addressing this. It is extraordinarily alarming that there are such exemptions. This may not involve the Minister of State, but any future Minister may come under pressure from industry lobbyists. He or she may decide to exempt a whole category of vessels and say the rules do not apply to them. That is a wrong provision. It should not be in the Bill. At a minimum, it should not be the case that vessels can be exempted from the rules contained in the international convention. If Ireland has signed up to it, we have signed up to it, so we should not be able to exempt certain people and say that those international safety standards apply to everybody but not to these guys. At another minimum, given the explicit and extra dangers, environmentally and socially, that flow from the fossil fuel industry and hydrocarbons more widely, it should not be the case that any vessels working with or involved in the fossil fuel industry would be exempted from requirements to comply with safety standards under this legislation. To me, that is obvious, and I would like the Minister of State to indicate whether he will remove this subsection altogether or whether he will at least put some form of guardrails around how that exemption may be applied by a future Minister.