2026-05-27

I move: That Standing Order 194 is modified in accordance with Standing Order 241(2) to provide that it be an instruction to the Committee in relation to the Gas Safety (Amendment) Bill 2026, that the Committee has power to make amendments to the Bill which are outside the scope of the existing subject matter of the Bill in order to amend the Turf Development Act 1998, in order to increase the statutory borrowing limit of Bord na Móna, and to change the title of the Bill and make other consequential amendments required to take account of the change above. I commend this motion to enable the introduction of the amendments to the Gas Safety (Amendment) Bill 2026 which are outside the scope of the Bill's original subject matter. The amendments address an outstanding issue for Bord na Móna with implications for the green transition. The purpose of this motion is to enable the committee to make certain amendments to the Gas Safety (Amendment) Bill 2026 which are beyond the scope of the Bill's original subject matter, as I said. The Bill, which completed Second Stage in the House in January of this year, addresses long-standing safety issues with regard to liquified petroleum gas and natural gas and I wish to ask the House for leave to attach amendments addressing another outstanding issue in the energy sector. New sections, which have necessitated this motion, will amend section 22(1) of the Turf Development Act 1998 which sets the statutory borrowing limit of Bord na Móna. This is currently set at €650 million. The amendment will raise this limit to €1.5 billion. The increase was requested by Bord na Móna to enable the delivery of its ten-year plan and to contribute to the achievement of targets under the national climate action plan. A higher borrowing limit will provide flexibility in how Bord na Móna funds future projects integral to the company's brown-to-green strategy which has seen it conclude all peat operations and emerge as a leading provider of renewable energy and climate solutions. It will avoid the need for large-scale asset disposal, including operational wind farms and development projects. Following the request of Bord na Móna, the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment, the Minister for Finance and the Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation consented to a statutory increase in the borrowing limit. The advice of the New Economy and Recovery Authority, NewERA, was sought. The authority issued a report recommending the increase. The process for consent to this change was in compliance with the requirements of section 8.23 of the code of practice for the governance of State bodies and Bord na Móna's shareholder expectation letter. Deputies may be assured that, following the increase to the statutory limit, any new borrowings on the part of Bord na Móna will require the consent of the Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment and the Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation. There will be an opportunity to discuss these amendments further on Committee Stage and I thank the Deputies for their support in enabling these important amendments to be debated as part of the Bill. I commend this motion to the House.

We will be supporting the Bill. Notwithstanding that, however, there is the issue of funding with the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, CRU. There are some concerns on a broader level. This is more, as they say, upstream. Regulation is to be in place, I understand, for 1 September for non-domestic gas, and roll-out plans, preparation and training, making sure that people who are qualified will be in place. There is a suspicion that pre-Creeslough we knew that the installation practices for third-party meters, who meter the State's LPG, needed to be revised. These new proposals are, of course, necessary. I have spoken to some of the Creeslough families. The DPP will take a decision. There is a suspicion, subject to any further investigation, that it may have been the result of a gas explosion. I renew the calls on that issue. The Minister of State might have a word with his colleague, the Minister for justice, about a public inquiry into what happened, pending, of course, what is coming from the DPP. For a decade we have had promises from the CRU for non-domestic gas regulation. Deadlines were missed and now this Bill is going through. As I said, it is not perfect. The installer representative panels have advocated for gas installers. They have to engage with the CRU and the gas safety supervisory body, GSSB, to resolve any challenges around the State. The panel opposed proposals on non-domestic gas installation in 2023 and 2024 and, as I said, deadlines were missed. The CRU then revised the criteria document. Some installers have a question about the consultation process and the level of public consultation with catering companies, the restaurant sector and hotels. I understand the public consultation has not been published. They feel the criteria document should have included changes to the registration process procedures and new entrant categories and established a dedicated body to manage updates. There is also a question about electronic gas certification. Again, that is not necessarily relevant to the Bill. We would welcome any progress on electronic gas certification when the system is up and running. Many thousands of households depend on gas. Of course, a lot of them are in arrears due to the cost of living crisis and supports have been ripped away. We need legislation that is complete, but there must be enough resourcing and sufficient numbers of people employed to ensure that the proposals in the Bill take effect and the system can run as well as it ought. The bottom line is public safety. People need to have confidence. The 12,000 households dependent on LNG and the 600,000 households using natural gas are finding it difficult to transition to any other sources of heat. We need to make sure their lives are not put at risk because if these systems fail or are unsafe, unfortunately, as we have seen, lives can be put at risk. We need strong legislation and robust regulation. We have to get it right. We support the Bill because, while it is not the perfect solution, it is a step in the right direction. We can deal with the amendments later. We were not expecting the Bord na Móna regulations until they came in. We can talk about that on that Stage.

We will support the Bill on Committee Stage. I echo a lot of the comments made by Deputy Daly. The Bill is not perfect, but it is an important step in strengthening the regulatory landscape here. The motion to instruct the committee relates to the amendment to increase Bord na Móna's borrowing limit, and I have no principled objection to that. I understand that borrowing limits require updating due to inflation or increases in corporate activity, etc., and from the perspective of the Department it might not be worth creating a whole new Act in that regard. I want to take this opportunity to make some broader points about Bord na Móna. Most pertinently, I want to make the point that it is probably time it received a statutory overhaul of its mandate. It is no longer a turf development company. Clearly, it has ended all peat harvesting on its lands. The commercial sale of peat in Ireland was banned in 2022, or at least it was supposed to have been. Any turf left in Ireland is not for exploitation for commercial purposes. In fact, Bord na Móna is now involved in pretty much the exact opposite activity, in that it is remediating and re-wetting bogs. It is in the climate solutions business now and has taken on an important role as a renewable energy provider, which is great to see, with equally important responsibilities as a major landowner and environmental custodian. We know the difficulties the Government is having regarding land use, land use change, emissions coming from that sector and how much work needs to be done in that area. Bord na Móna will play a critical role in some of that. There has been substantial change in what Bord na Móna actually does, but it has made this change without any structural overhaul of the legislation underpinning it. The primary objectives of the company, as set out in the Turf Development Act, no longer apply. It has instead relied on ancillary objectives and powers throughout its so-called brown to green transition. I suggest that now that the transition period is more or less complete, it would be appropriate to bring forward new legislation to underpin the company's new role and clarify its mandate. The second point I would like to raise is the proposal to co-locate renewable infrastructure with massive data centres on Bord na Móna land, so-called energy parks. I am deeply uncomfortable with a semi-State body tasked with renewable infrastructure development having a strategic partnership with a tech giant like Amazon in the first place. As a matter of principle, I do not like that we are depending on it for funding. The energy transition must, first and foremost, be about people, just transition and nature restoration, and not satisfying the needs and wants of the world tech oligarchs. We already have a situation whereby data centres are sucking up virtually all of the renewable energy we are generating in this country, meaning that it is not going towards helping households move to cleaner sources or decarbonising our energy sector. These energy park proposals betray the Government's thinking. I generally fear that we are witnessing a corporate capture of clean energy in Ireland. We have to ask ourselves if plonking a 500 MW data centre on former bog land owned by a semi-State company is really the best use of our resources. That is as much electricity as is consumed by 325,000 homes. Where do we want our renewable energy to go? Do we want it to go to help households up and down the country which are still dependent on fossil fuels and currently being pilloried by their bills? Do we want to help them transition to cleaner renewable energy or do we want to help the tech giants? We have serious questions about the environmental biodiversity impacts these projects will have on lands that we need to re-wild or bogs that we may need to re-wet. The Labour Party has a view on that. The Department of enterprise seems to have taken its view. I would like to hear the views of the Minister of State's Department. I am sure he will say we need to consider our industrial strategy and so on, but the wind only seems to be blowing one direction, pardon the pun. Virtually everything we have seen from this Government so far with regard to renewable energy and energy more broadly seems to be to the overwhelming benefit of corporate interests. The private wires legislation, of which data centres will be the primary beneficiary, is another example. I echo the calls of other Members of the Opposition that the Minister, Deputy Burke, his officials and representatives from Bord na Móna and Amazon come before the climate committee to discuss these proposals. We need to get our priorities straight. We should not be building massive privately owned and operated data centres on what is, in effect, State land. We should not be building renewable infrastructure just to satisfy their insatiable demands.

I thank Deputies for their contributions. I appreciate the assistance of Members of the House in enabling this minor but important legislative change to be discussed as part of the Gas Safety (Amendment) Bill 2026. This will enable the Government to expedite a measure which ensures Bord na Móna's future as a vital contributor to our green transition. Deputy Daly raised the issue - we may get to it as part of the second debate on the Bill - about the relationship of the Bill to the tragic incident that occurred in Creeslough. As I understand it, the Bill was not prompted at all by the Creeslough tragedy and at the time of that incident, the CRU had already published its final decision on the regulation of LPG networks and work on this legislation had actually begun. The safety amendments will bring all operators of LPG distribution networks within the scope of safety licensing by the CRU and will strengthen the commission's existing powers in regard to gas and LPG safety generally. In 2022, the memorandum of understanding was agreed upon and signed by An Garda Síochána, the Health and Safety Authority and the CRU to facilitate the sharing of information and resources between agencies. On the issues Deputy Ahern raised, there is a fundamental misunderstanding by some of the role played by data centres. I am not at all suggesting that is the case in Deputy Ahern's situation but in the minds of some of the public, data centres are part of an infrastructure that is necessary to provide entertainment to a modern generation and that somehow, the nice to have things like Netflix, TikTok or YouTube are effectively stored in these repositories. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Data centres are now what advanced factories were in the 1980s. Ultimately, they are a sharing of filing cabinets that were a feature of Georgian offices dotted around this city and elsewhere around the world. In fact, very significant reductions in energy use are a result of bringing that data management together. It is never discussed but if you had individual racks in offices rather than as part of the cloud, there would be a much greater drain on the electricity network. From an Irish perspective, the Deputy rightly identified something when he asked is this the industrial strategy or is this the direction the Government is going and where does our Department sit in it? He raised the point in a careful and balanced way and to some extent, he asked is it data centres or is it cheaper electricity for households? A fundamental part of the capacity of a household to pay for electricity is the requirement they have work. Data centres, whether we like it or not, are part of the direction of travel from the tech sector. More and more people are working from home. That is a good thing and one of the positives that came out of the pandemic, if any did. Cloud computing and cloud access provide the infrastructure to do that. Data centres are part of that. I do not see data centres as bad things at all. Yes, they are a challenge to us because we have seen underinvestment in our key infrastructure for decades, particularly in the grid and the generation of electricity. We are going through that transition so there are two things happening at the same time. We are trying to transition our immediate demand for energy from fossil fuels to renewable electricity as we are repowering the economy but we are also getting that exponential growth right at the same time as we need that clean energy, with demand driven by artificial intelligence and other advances in the tech sector. It is a particular challenge for us. We have been behind the curve but between now and 2030, over €18 billion will be invested by EirGrid into the grid. We are doing with EirGrid something like what we are doing with Bord na Móna as part of this. We are putting in core capital of €3 billion to allow EirGrid to borrow more. We are raising the borrowing limit for Bord na Móna to allow it to become an enabler. I take the Deputy's point about being careful about our relationship with oligarchs in the tech sector. What is on offer is a positive in terms of future economic growth and support for the tech sector, more generally. This morning, I spoke at a Digital Infrastructure Ireland conference. It is a body that speaks for the data centres and there was a report prepared by Jim Power. It was saying that if we do not get our act together here and do not figure out a way to allow growth in data centres, other countries will attract that. I was in Alberta, Canada, as part of the St. Patrick's Day discussions and we saw they are trying to attract data centres. By their nature, data centres are not big employers but they attract other enterprises around them. If we do not succeed in anchoring the data here, others will and they will benefit in terms of the tech jobs of the future. There is a job of work to be done.