2026-04-14

I move: "That the Bill be now read a Second Time." I welcome the opportunity to bring the Critical Infrastructure Bill 2026 forward for consideration by the Dáil today. The Bill is a central pillar of the Government’s infrastructure reforms. While its impact will be wide-ranging, it is a very clear and focused piece of legislation that is to the point. Its objective is to accelerate the provision of infrastructure in energy, transport, water and other sectors to get more housing built, make progress towards our climate objectives and support the continued social and economic development of our nation. Its rapid development and progression serve as a tangible demonstration of the Government’s commitment to meaningfully accelerate those strategically important projects that are essential to the State’s economic and social development. The events of recent days have reinforced and underscored the central importance of critical infrastructure to the very functioning of our economy. We have also seen the severe consequences across our society when infrastructure fails. Ireland has long struggled with an infrastructural deficit. We have made some progress in closing this gap, with the difference between Ireland and our EU neighbours estimated to have halved over the past 30 years. A gap still remains, however, with most experts, international and domestic, suggesting the gap is equivalent to a 25% to 30% deficit in capital stock compared to our peers. What this means in practical terms is not enough housing to provide accommodation for our people, it means not enough renewable electricity to reach our climate targets and it means more time spent by many commuters frustrated in traffic. If we cannot build the infrastructure fast enough, this deficit will increase as our economy and population continue to grow. The risk this poses to our society is unacceptable. The global economic uncertainty makes the need for strong and resilient infrastructure even greater. Our domestic and international competitiveness is the key to our continued economic success. Nationally, the single greatest challenge we face is delivering housing and housing-enabled infrastructure. According to the International Institute for Management Development, IMD’s world competitiveness rankings 2025, we are one of the most competitive economies in the world. However, under the heading of infrastructure, our performance continues to lag behind some other developed nations. Within a few short years, we will face critical shortages of power and water alongside congestion across our transport networks. At a time when decarbonisation is among our highest priorities, we have the slowest approval processes for renewable electricity in the EU. The case for change is clear. It is urgent and, as evidenced by the publication of this critical legislation in addition to the extensive package of reforms we are progressing, it is the Government’s highest priority. The pace of infrastructure delivery over the coming years will determine our economic success, our climate resilience and the quality of life enjoyed by communities across the country. The effective and timely delivery of new infrastructure will be the single most important determinant of our future prosperity. Ireland is at a critical juncture. The pace of infrastructure delivery over the years to come will determine our economic competitiveness. In terms of the guiding principle, the work undertaken to accelerate the deliver of infrastructure its to create the conditions where the essential goods and services people need are plentiful and where the focus is on what is delivered. Over the past 20 years, we have had lots of layering of new regulations and processes that have been designed to improve infrastructure delivery but many of them are having unintended consequences because of the sheer weight of them. If we want infrastructure to move, we must strip away what is unnecessary. Essential protections remain vital, but progress requires accepting some risk and being clear about priorities so we can reach a position where our future is defined by possibility rather than constant constraint. That requires the relevant water, power and transport infrastructure to fuel the needs of our economy and to supply the scale of housing that our population requires. Since I was appointed Minister for public expenditure, I have made accelerating infrastructure my number one priority. An infrastructure division was formed in my Department in April last year, including staff from key semi-State agencies. We formed the a task force to provide strategic guidance and expert input. Six independent experts, experienced in infrastructure delivery, combined with six members, taken from those commercial semi-States at the front line of infrastructure development and the local government sector worked with my officials to identify the barriers to infrastructure and the solutions needed to overcome them. This was complemented by a public consultation launched in June. This consultation laid bare the huge concern over the pace and quality of infrastructure delivery in Ireland. Overly long timelines, fragmented governance and misalignment with climate and environmental goals all featured heavily in the views expressed. In July, I published the Department 's assessment of the 12 most pressing barriers to infrastructure. This was not an exhaustive list; rather these 12 barriers were considered by the Department to represent the most impactful problems, delaying infrastructure provision. This assessment of barriers laid the foundation for the next phase of work, and in December last year, I published the Accelerating Infrastructure Report and Action Plan. This sets out a comprehensive programme of actions designed to speed up the delivery of critical infrastructure across the State. The plan sets out 30 targeted, time-bound actions grouped under four pillars, each addressing a key area of reform. The measures provide for a whole-of-government approach to ensure that capital investment translates into timely, co-ordinated delivery of the infrastructure. Legal reform is the first action pillar listed in the report and enacting legislation to accelerate the provision of critical infrastructure is the second. This leads me on to the Bill we are discussing. I will briefly summarise what the Bill will do. It will allow the Government to designate certain infrastructure projects or programmes as critical. In response to this designation, all public bodies involved at any stage in the authorisation process for this infrastructure must prioritise and accelerate the authorisation process applied to the maximum extent possible while still meeting their other statutory duties. It also disapplies section 15 of the climate Act to their consideration of designated projects or programmes. By establishing a clear legal basis for prioritisation, it will reduce ambiguity and ensure that critical projects and programmes receive focused and co-ordinated attention across Departments, regulators and agencies. It will address the unacceptable delays in our infrastructure approval processes by mandating whole-of-State co-operation and creating a fast-track pathway for critical projects and programmes without skipping steps in the approval process or weakening any safeguards. The Bill forms a central pillar of the Government’s broader infrastructure acceleration agenda, signalling a significant shift toward fast-tracking strategically important projects deemed essential to the State’s economic and social development. The Bill is focused, and I will through it section by section. Section 1 is the interpretation. It notes that infrastructure is anything that enables the essential facilities and systems of the State to function effectively and includes, but is not limited to: transport facilities, including ports and airports, and transport systems, including roads and railways; energy generation, transmission and distribution systems; and water supply, wastewater and waste management systems. It further sets out that a project is something the purpose of which is the delivery of infrastructure, and is funded by capital investment, by or on behalf of the State or by on behalf of a public body. A programme is simply a collection of two or more projects that are intended to achieve a common purpose. Finally, it is worth noting that the section defines an authorisation as an award, approval, decision, licence, consent, permit or other authority required, granted or made, by or under an enactment or otherwise, to enable a project or programme to proceed in whole or in part. Fundamentally, this section sets out the necessary underpinning terms that describe the specifics of what the provisions in the Bill apply to. As I have consistently stated, the focus for acceleration will be on the critical infrastructure necessary to underpin the development of all other infrastructure in the country. Every development, regardless of purpose, needs energy, water and a transport link to operate. If we can accelerate the provision this fundamental network infrastructure, it will lead to broader momentum and acceleration across all other types of development, particularly housing. To be eligible for inclusion, this infrastructure must be built by or on behalf of the State. Section 2 simply notes that nothing in the Bill will affect existing or future obligations of the State under EU law. This is included to demonstrate that the Bill will not interfere in any way with our EU commitments, whether they relate to environmental protection or climate change targets or more broadly. Section 3 deals with how projects or programmes will be designated as critical infrastructure. The Minister for public expenditure will make a recommendation to Government in respect of an individual project or programme. The Government will consider the recommendation and, if approved, an order designating a project or programme as critical infrastructure will be laid before this House. The section also lists those factors that the Minister may have regard to in making a recommendation to the Government. An administrative process will be put in place to facilitate those recommendations but I do not plan to commence this process until after the Oireachtas has approved this legislation. As such, I reiterate that my priority will be on recommending those projects or programmes that facilitate critical infrastructure across the energy, transport and water sectors with a particular focus on infrastructure that will support additional housing but the legislation specifically does not preclude other infrastructure types. Section 4 determines who the provisions of this Bill apply to. In short, a relevant public body is any public body which has a role in the approval process for designated infrastructure. This means anyone in the development chain who must give an approval, licence, consent, permission or any kind of authorisation for the infrastructure. This is a deliberately wide net to ensure that the acceleration process will be comprehensive. Section 5 is the core aspect of the Bill. It sets out the specific duties that will be applied to relevant public bodies. There are six core duties that they will be required to perform on the enactment of this Bill. First, public bodies will be required to prioritise any functions they must perform in relation to designated critical infrastructure projects or programmes above their other duties. Next, each public body must take all necessary steps to accelerate their consideration of the designated project or programme and avoid any undue delays. Followed by this, the relevant public body must reduce the time required for any decision in relation to a project or programme. They must make every effort to parallel their processes with the authorisations that may be required by other public bodies. Next, they are required to co-ordinate, prioritise and sequence their functions in respect of managing risks and constraints. Finally, a public body must allocate the resources that may be required to fulfil its duties under the Bill. The Bill does not dictate the decision that public bodies must reach. Instead, it sets out a clear articulation of the number of projects or programmes that the Government considers vital to the public interest and mandates that public bodies need to accelerate their decision-making processes with regard to these projects. This idea has been developed following on from the engagement I have had with respect to many of these public bodies. Specifically, they have been clear that a focussed articulation of what the most important projects are will be beneficial. I am confident that providing this and giving public bodies the obligation but also the vires to accelerate their decision-making processes will lead to much faster decision making in respect of identified projects. Section 6 allows the Minister for public expenditure to issue directions to any relevant public bodies. These directions may require the provision of information on the measures that the public body has adopted and the outcome of these actions. The purpose of this is to allow for a tracking and evaluation of the actions taken by each public body and the impact these actions may have had on the approval timelines for a designated project or programme. The provision also allows direction to be issued requiring a public body to adopt such measures as may be deemed necessary for the purposes of carrying out its duties. Section 7 disapplies section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 from designated projects and programmes. This is the only substantive change that is being made to existing legislation and I will shortly outline the reasons for this. Section 8 provides for regulations to be issued under the Bill when enacted. The only power for regulations is to allow additional public bodies to be designated in the event of any other legal change that might mean a body has a function in relation to a designated project or programme but is not captured within the definitions. Section 9 is a standard provision that allows for any expenses incurred in the administration of the Bill when enacted to be paid out of moneys provided by the Oireachtas. The final section of the Bill sets out the Short Title and commencement of the Bill. We want to advance this as quickly as possible. The Bill effectively disapplies section 15 of the climate change Act from those projects and programmes that are designated as critical infrastructure by the Government. It does not mean that climate considerations will be set aside in these projects. Every Exchequer-funded project is already required to measure and price its greenhouse gas emissions under the infrastructure guidelines. Similarly, every individual project is also required to undergo a climate adaptation assessment to ensure it does not give rise to undue risks. All other climate and environmental obligations will still apply, such as building regulations and the use of low-carbon cement in construction. It was never intended that the climate action Act would be used to allow the decisions taken by public bodies in relation to individual projects or programmes to be challenged in the courts. Disapplication of section 15 removes an unnecessary layer that is driving a wider increase and risk around judicial reviews. It is abundantly clear that some of these reviews are being taken for ideological reasons, often steeped in a degrowth agenda that seeks to frustrate the delivery of critical infrastructure, some of which can be connected to renewable projects. That is not an agenda that is supported by this Government. The accelerating infrastructure report and actions also commit to the development of a robust emergency powers framework that can meaningfully accelerate the delivery of critical infrastructure. The work on this legislation is proceeding in parallel this year. The Government’s prudent management means there is money to deliver across an ambitious capital investment programme. In the past five years, more than €65 billion has been invested in capital infrastructure projects across our country through the national development plan, NDP. Over the next ten years, that will rise to €275 billion. Total capital investment in 2026 alone is expected to reach €19.1 billion. This is the largest capital investment programme the State has ever seen. However, if this funding is to be delivered and if its outcomes are to be as expected, funding needs to be matched with reform. The accelerating infrastructure report is one of the most ambitious reform agendas ever adopted by the State. It is a cornerstone across this legislative agenda today, but also in the context of the emergency powers framework we are working on. The Bill is all about accelerating the delivery of critical infrastructure for our country. It will do so by prioritising those projects that the Government identifies and this House endorses above all others. It will create a fast-track channel for these projects through existing authorisation processes. Relevant public bodies will have to consider how each of them can reprioritise within their organisations and work better with other agencies while still undertaking the respective due diligence required for each project. There will still be public participation at each stage of the development process, and the legislation will not change this. With regard to the changes in the climate Act, the only practical impact of this Bill will be to remove an avenue for judicial reviews, one that, in my view, is being used to delay rather than accelerate climate action in some instances. The Bill is ambitious, but ambition is what is required if we are to meet the infrastructure needs of our population. I hope that we can have a robust debate and engagement today on the Bill. It will not weaken climate protections and it will not diminish public participation in infrastructure development. Rather, it allows the Government, with the endorsement of this House, to identify the most critical infrastructure projects and provides public bodies with the vires to treat these projects with the urgency they absolutely need. I look forward to working with everyone in this House in bringing forward and advancing this legislation in the coming weeks.

Is é buninfreastruchtúr ceann de na rudaí is tábhachtaí d’aon cheantar nó pobal atá ina gcónaí i gceantar tuaithe ach go háirithe, áit go minic nach bhfuil an buninfreastruchtúr ann. Mar gheall air sin, ar ndóigh, is maith an rud é go bhfuilimid á phlé seo agus ag breathnú air. Tá súil agam go gciallóidh sé go ndíreoidh an Rialtas ar chúrsaí infrastruchtúr, ach go háirithe sna ceantair cosúil leis an gceantar in atá mé féin i gConamara. Critical infrastructure is something I have been raising with the Minister for a long time, specifically basic infrastructure, something we often just do not have in the west of Ireland. Critical infrastructure is the bedrock of a strong, functioning economy. Housing, health, transport, water and energy are the essentials - the necessities - to be able to work, to be able to be healthy and to be safe. We desperately need critical infrastructure to be delivered. This is a deficit created by chronic underfunding and a lack of ambition from successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael governments. I am keen to engage with any proposals from the Government to address this infrastructural deficit, but, to my mind, this Bill in front of us falls at the first hurdle. It is a Critical Infrastructure Bill without a definition of “critical infrastructure”. Under this legislation, it would solely be at the Minister’s discretion to designate projects as critical infrastructure. In practice, this means that a Minister could decide that a new data centre, a premium office block or a new stadium is critical infrastructure and, as such, would be fast-tracked through that delivery pipeline, while real critical infrastructure, including homes, hospitals, roads, railways and bridges, i gConamara ach go háirithe, are not guaranteed critical status and could be left by the wayside and not sped up at all. To be honest, I believe this omission is a huge oversight. Clearer guidelines have to be included in this legislation as to what actually constitutes "critical infrastructure". I will be putting in amendments in relation to this aspect. Sílim gurb í an fhadhb is mó atá ann mar gheall ar chúrsaí infrastruchtúir ná nach bhfuil muinín ag daoine go ndéanfaidh Fine Gael agus Fianna Fáil beart de réir a mbriathar. The Government just simply cannot be trusted on infrastructure delivery. The infrastructure that has been prioritised by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael over the last decades has failed people. It has served big business over the interests of working people and families. We are the data centre capital of Europe. Brand-new office blocks are sitting empty and our cities are full of new hotels instead of new homes. Yet investment in the critical infrastructure really needed has been delayed or discontinued. There has been inaction, delays and bad value for taxpayer’s money. This is the track record of critical infrastructural delivery by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, a record best known by the projects that have still not been delivered, not least the national children’s hospital. All the Government’s attempts so far to speed up infrastructure delivery have had the opposite effect. The disastrous strategic housing development legislation introduced in 2017 caused havoc in the planning system, only to be replaced by the equally ineffective large-scale residential development legislation. Every single time the Government tries to speed up delivery, it slows it down. The biggest obstacle to delivering critical infrastructure with urgency has always been Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in government. Before the recess, the Government used its majority in the infrastructure committee to waive this legislation from having necessary pre-legislative scrutiny. We did push a vote on this, and it was very disappointing that pre-legislative scrutiny could not have been accommodated on something as important as this legislation. This was done without providing the committee with a finished copy of the legislation. I think that was totally and utterly unacceptable. It meant we did not get a chance to hear from experts in relation to the legislation. We did not get a chance to hear from Uisce Éireann, Transport Infrastructure Ireland, the HSE, environmental groups, housing associations and many other groups that have been suffering as a result of the lack of critical infrastructure being delivered. I hope that this legislation is not rushed now on Committee Stage, and that it will be given the time needed. We must make sure that critical infrastructure is actually done right. We are going to engage on Committee Stage and, of course, bring in our amendments in relation to this legislation. We are going to scrutinise this legislation with our eyes totally and utterly wide open. It was really unfortunate, though, that pre-legislative scrutiny was not allowed.

Sinn Féin will support measures that genuinely speed up the delivery of critical infrastructure, and there is no question that this State needs urgent investment and delivery at scale. This Government has a clear problem with delivery. Communities are repeatedly told that projects are coming, funding is allocated and plans are in place, but what they experience instead are delays, stalled timelines, missed deadlines and a lack of urgency. The infrastructure deficit we face today has been built up over decades. Communities across the State have been left waiting while projects are delayed, scaled back or abandoned altogether. You cannot build on top of announcements. You cannot drive on announcements. You cannot grow an economy on announcements or on plans and strategies. This Government cannot be trusted on infrastructure delivery. Its record is one of inaction, delay and poor value for money time and time again. We now have legislation that does not even clearly define what “critical infrastructure” is in its own title. It does not define the term and that is a serious weakness. It gives the Minister, and whoever is the Minister of the day, wide discretion to designate projects, creating a real risk that developments will be fast-tracked without proper scrutiny, while the infrastructure that people actually rely on continues to fall behind. The Government can designate and announce as much as it likes, but it will all be judged on whether it delivers. Nowhere is the failure to deliver starker than in Waterford and across the south east. The south east has 9% of the State’s population yet receives just 1.8% of major capital spending. It now has the lowest level of per capita investment of any region in the State. None of that is an accident. It reflects a clear and sustained pattern of neglect that cannot be ignored. The consequences of that neglect are visible across Waterford. The urgent safety upgrades to the N25 in Waterford are stalled, while the N24 has not progressed. Public transport investment lags far behind demand. The Waterford to Rosslare line has been shelved and there have been cuts to wider rail services, including the Waterford to Dublin route. As the Minister knows, Waterford Airport was left without proper State backing, to the point that a private investor had to step in to fund the runway extension. In healthcare, University Hospital Waterford still does not have full 24-7 cardiac care. In education, the South East Technological University continues to receive the lowest level of funding of any technological university. Water and wastewater infrastructure is acting as a direct barrier to housing and development, with urgent upgrades needed in Lismore, Bunmahon, Crook, Passage, Portlaw and beyond, yet these projects are repeatedly deprioritised. In Dunmore East, the fishing harbour requires development to support the local industry. The wider harbour has clear potential for tourism, while cé Helvic i nGaeltacht na nDéise remains effectively unusable due to the lack of dredging there. In housing, targets have been missed to such an extent that people are now struggling to live and remain in their own communities. Entire villages and towns are facing a demographic cliff edge. That is the lived reality of infrastructure failure in Waterford. For rural communities, the impact is even more acute. When infrastructure is delayed or denied it is rural towns and villages that feel it first and hardest. Without roads, public transport, water and wastewater capacity and healthcare provision, there is no foundation for growth. If this legislation is to have any credibility, it must focus on prioritising the infrastructure that communities actually need, alongside clear accountability for delivery and fair, balanced regional investment. Waterford and the south east and rural communities across the State deserve the same level of ambition, investment and delivery as anywhere else.

I hope the Critical Infrastructure Bill will not represent yet another failure for rural Ireland, which for too long has been left behind with regard to investment in infrastructure. Nowhere is that more evident then in the state of our regional and local roads, which are in urgent need of investment, and also our wastewater treatment plants and water infrastructure. In Mayo, our roads are lifelines for our communities. However, years of underinvestment have left many of these roads in poor condition, placing a daily burden on residents and undermining economic development. Many times in this House, I have asked for the R312 connecting the Erris region and Castlebar to be designated a strategic regional road so that it receives the necessary funding to be upgraded and improved for the many people who rely on it daily. A friend of mine was travelling on the R312 a couple of weeks ago when the Fitbit device on her wrist hand went off to indicate she was working out. This is the absolute truth. Anyone who has travelled to the R312 will know exactly what is meant by that. The road from Belmullet to Castlebar, the R312, is absolutely horrendous and we have asked for years, if not decades, to have it strategically designated. There is no point in having a Wild Atlantic Way and all kinds of advertisements if we do not have the basic infrastructure. The R312 is the main road connecting Castlebar hospital with Erris. We talked here a number of weeks ago about Stephen Lavelle from Belmullet who lost his life while waiting for an ambulance. The R312 was the last road he travelled. It is just crazy. Rural Ireland cannot reach its full potential if its infrastructure continues to lag behind. Households wait for years on end to get funding for roads under the local improvement scheme, LIS. We are talking about critical infrastructure. For people who need to access their homes, it is critical that they have a road to drive on. They pay property tax and other taxes, yet they are denied basic access. I was in Belderrig in north Mayo a couple of weeks ago and one of the roads I drove on was covered in huge potholes. I was embarrassed, but if I had been in government all these years, I would be absolutely ashamed. No one takes responsibility. People have to wait and wait for repairs which never come. The list of LIS roads gets longer and longer. Where is the accountability and funding? We are not looking for highways, just roads that are fit to drive on. I raised the issue of maintenance and repairs for piers with the Taoiseach. The tragic death of Joachim McNulty, who drowned when his car slipped on algae on Belderrig pier, would have been avoided if the proper maintenance and safety features were done on the pier. That is critical infrastructure. If we take, for example, Mayo University Hospital and Belmullet hospital, every time there is an election there is announcement, and then another, while people wait for projects that are never delivered and are critical to communities. The Minister is familiar with the Newport sewerage scheme. We are now told we will have to wait until 2030 for that. For heaven's sake, these are vital pieces of infrastructure that need to be done for the people of Newport. The crazy thing about it is that businesses in Newport have to pay for the sewerage going into the bay. It is just wrong and cannot continue. I hope that in some way this Bill will serve to address that. The strategic development zone, SDZ, around Knock Airport has to be done as well and it must be speeded up. We cannot wait any longer.

Hear hear.

The situation with regard to infrastructure around the country is poor, to say the least. In rural areas and the north west it is extremely poor. I will mention a few of the issues. The south Leitrim water scheme, which provides water for more than two thirds of the population of County Leitrim, is currently operating at more than 100% capacity. It is meant to operate at 80% capacity so there is little spare capacity, but it is operating at over 100%. If someone in the region looks for planning permission to build 100 houses, and one of the key infrastructural issues is housing, they cannot get a letter from Irish Water to say they will get water because the water is not available. That is just one example of a major infrastructural problem that is blocking progress and people having some chance of having a home to live in. They cannot build because the infrastructure is not in place. One of the key pieces of infrastructure along the west coast is the western rail corridor. We have been talking for years about what can be done and the positive impact reopening that rail link from Sligo right down that corridor would have on the entire western seaboard. That project needs to be prioritised. Reports have been done but the problem with many of the reports on the western rail corridor is that they look at the issue in a very narrow way. When they check how many people would use the rail line, they use the number of people living within 5 km of the line. The rail line to Dublin goes past my house. Most people travel 30 or 40 miles to get to the railway. It is a much bigger piece of infrastructure that could service a lot more people than those living within a narrow corridor around it. It is critical that that infrastructure is put in place. Health is another major issue. In Sligo University Hospital we have serious problems with overcrowding, insufficient bed numbers and the age of the infrastructure. The roof of the theatre for orthopaedics leaked last summer. When the roof was fixed it was then discovered there was another problem with the heating. For the past year, the theatre has been closed more often than it has been open. That is because that particular piece of infrastructure has aged out. It is not fit for purpose and needs to be built out anew. We have a similar problem with regard to renal services. People attend the hospital for dialysis but again, the services in place are totally inadequate. Promises have been made but nothing has been delivered. We have serious problems with road infrastructure in my constituency and everywhere else. The problem seems to be that Governments continually look at where the crisis is rather than planning long term for the future, which is what needs to happen. We need a Government that will plan for the future and provide services and critical infrastructure for people in order that we have an economy that functions. Most of the west, including my part of the country, has the greatest potential because it has the least investment. The eastern seaboard is bursting at the seams. Nobody can get a house to rent in Dublin, yet in other parts of the country where there is ample space and opportunity, there is no investment. That is what we need to get balanced right. We need to get proper rail and road infrastructure in the regions, we need to get proper investment into the regions, and we need to ensure we can do that by having investment from the Government. These are not costs the taxpayer will bear and are then gone forever. They are investments that will pay off dividends in the long run. This is why it is absolutely critical the Government recognises the need to provide the maximum amount of funding for key projects in areas where we have the most potential, particularly in areas in the north west, throughout the midlands and throughout the western seaboard where we have the same issues. People always say to me that when they educate their children, most of them will be getting jobs for graduates and a lot of those graduate jobs are elsewhere, not back in their own region. The main reason is that they do not have the infrastructure to get those jobs to move into the region. One example was presented to me the other day and when I saw it, I wondered what was wrong. We meet the Atlantic Technological University every year as part of our engagement with IBEC. The university has for years been looking for the Government to allow it to borrow money to build its own student accommodation on its own land. That is what it has looked to do. Probably for the last five or six years, every time we have met the university, it has asked, "Can you please lobby the Government so that we can have the right to borrow money to build the houses so we can have them into the future and we can rent them out to the students?" It would be an income source for the university. Last week, the Minister announced that there is going to be a public private partnership. A private corporation or company is going to come in and build those houses, rent them out to the students and make the money on them, with land owned by the university. It is again back to this thing of providing an opportunity for the well-connected rather than providing something that would provide a piece of critical infrastructure for the people who need it, the students in that region and everywhere else. This is one of the problems this Government has. Everything it does, all of the time, is to look after the well-connected rather than the people who elected them and who they should be looking after, up and down the length and breadth of this nation.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important Bill. I will be sharing time with my colleagues Deputies Conor Sheehan and George Lawlor. It is a short Bill at just ten pages and comprising ten section, but it is of real and critical significance to our economy and our society. The infrastructure deficit in our country is perhaps the biggest single economic challenge we have. As the Minister recounted earlier, the IMF has estimated that Ireland is looking at an infrastructure deficit, or physical infrastructure gap, of about 32% relative to the economies that we compare ourselves against. The quality gap is 27%. To make a political point, that is the legacy of underinvestment from successive Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil Governments and it has left us lagging behind. Successive Governments over the last ten years have, frankly, been crippled by their own conservatism and they have shown a risk aversion to engaging in the kinds of developments we require to move our economy along, to address our climate challenge and to improve our society. Nobody here needs a history lesson. We know that we have had at least ten years of real problems where, due to the economic collapse, we simply did not have the resources to provide the infrastructure this country requires, but we have had the resources since 2016 and few efforts were made to address that deficit and the gap. Those chickens are coming home to roost. I said before the last election, and it was not a pithy throwaway remark, that based on our experience the biggest threat to the Irish economic model was not the return of Donald Trump to the White House but the re-election of Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil. I am pleased to see, however, that there is at least a new impetus and a new focus on the delivery of the infrastructure we require in this country. We have managed to waste a boom over the last decade. A lot of the social and economic problems we are experiencing now, and the challenges that households and businesses are facing, are a direct result of that. We are sitting on record tax receipts but we have allowed our infrastructure gap to widen and widen. This is not an abstract point or an abstract debate. The infrastructure gap and its implications are something that every citizen of this country sees and experiences every day, such as the hospital wings that have been promised but not delivered, the bridges that are never built, the renewable energy resources that were promised and have yet to materialise, and the houses that will not be completed because the necessary water systems are not there. An infrastructure deficit is, more than anything else, what holds people back from living the best lives they can. I say it time and again that this is what makes Ireland a rich country that at the same time feels so poor. This is the Irish contradiction and the Irish dilemma: a rich country that feels so poor. We are very poor when it comes to the infrastructure that we have available. We are entitled to expect better in this rich country but we do not have it. It has been encouraging in the last few months to see a Government that is finally engaging on this issue and getting serious about infrastructure. It is long overdue but the analysis of the problem and the solutions proposed in the accelerating infrastructure report did show a Government that is getting serious about tackling this problem. As the Minister will know, that initiative was welcomed by the Labour Party. It would be easy for those of us in opposition to decry every Government report and every Government initiative and use the routine response that not enough is being done and so on. That initiative was evidence that there was a renewed interest in developing infrastructure and taking a new approach. As a party that cares about this country and is genuinely patriotic, we know that if this works and if the Government manages to deliver the housing, the health services, the critical infrastructure and the renewable energy we need, our country will do better and the Government will be judged on delivery. That brings us to today's Bill. The idea proposed here is a simple one, that the Government should be able to point to a certain project and say, "This project is very important for all of our society", and therefore direct its various agencies and Departments to prioritise and work together to get a particular project over the line. On the face of it this simple idea seems like a sensible one. A citizen watching us today spending several hours debating this Bill might very well ask, "Well, why is this not happening already?". They would certainly be entitled to wonder whether it really requires primary legislation for the Government to be able to tell public bodies - the public bodies that are our accountable to this House and accountable to the Minister and funded by the taxpayer - to prioritise a certain project. What we have seen today is actually a failure of politics, a failure of leadership, a failure of governance and a failure of management. People will be entitled to ask if this is the answer to the problems and whether this is really the Government's solution to one of the most pressing challenges we face as a country by making a law to allow itself to ask or request public bodies to hurry up a bit. If this is the extent of the ambition on infrastructure we will see over the next three years, then many citizens are entitled to be worried. They might also ask whether, if this Bill had been passed five years ago or ten years ago, we would have an open and fully functioning national children's hospital by now. Would we be able to step outside Leinster House and get onto a metro to the airport, or would the systemic issues hampering and delaying these projects and so many others have remained in spite of this legislation? I will turn now to a serious point that my colleague Deputy Sheehan will elaborate on later. Buried in this Bill are potentially significant constitutional issues that may arise, and in our view will arise, which risk leaving this legislation exposed to challenge. I am talking about section 7, which disapplies section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act from designated projects and programmes, as the Minister outlined earlier. I looked very carefully at some of the countervailing measures and legislation in terms of publishing orders and bringing all those orders to the House, effectively putting them in the Oireachtas Library, and procedurally trying to make sure that the Minister follows a particular process to try, insofar as he can, to make this legislation bulletproof. I suspect, however, that it is not possible to do that in this legislation and I think there are flaws here. This is a step beyond simply instructing public bodies to prioritise and co-ordinate the fast-tracking of projects. It seems that what the Government is proposing here is to give the Executive the power to disapply the public body duty under the climate action Acts to perform public functions consistent with achieving the State's climate goals. Taken with the backsliding we have seen today, for example on the collection of carbon duties, this Government's commitment on climate action is very much in doubt. We could see the State's biggest and most significant infrastructure projects being exempted from climate considerations altogether, despite what the Minister said in his remarks and his claims to the contrary with regard to other sections of the legislation. In effect, this legislation would undermine the letter, spirit and tone of the 2015 Act itself. It is not clear to me where this proposal has come from. Maybe if pre-legislative scrutiny had not been waived, we could have got to the bottom of this. I can only conclude there was a fear that if pre-legislative scrutiny got under way, this aspect of the legislation would be exposed and brought to further public attention. It is not a measure that was recommended in the Accelerating Infrastructure report. In fact, that report speaks glowingly of our commitment to climate targets, as it should. We should not allow ourselves to fall into the trap of thinking we can prioritise either climate action or infrastructure delivery. We can do both. I have been critical before of the way this Government is thinking about its infrastructure agenda. We are repeatedly seeing this type of binary thinking that pits climate against delivery and that should not be the case. I have said it in the House to the Minister and others that there appeared to be in the Accelerating Infrastructure report a fixation on judicial review and clouding of the picture. There was intense media interest in the judicial review aspects of the report as well. What seems to be proposed here is something that involves a risk that could deny citizens their rights to access justice under binding international agreements like the Aarhus Convention. That is something we need to be extremely mindful of.

Cuirim fáilte i bprionsabal roimh an mBille seo. Mar a dúirt an tAire, tá moill ollmhór againn sa tír seo maidir le cúrsaí bonneagair. Ceann de na fadhbanna is mó atá againn maidir leis an ngéarchéim tithíochta ná an ghéarchéim nó an mhoill leis an mbonneagar. Sa tír seo, tá fadhb mhór againn i gceithre réimse thábhachtacha: cúrsaí tithíochta, sláinte, iompair agus leictreachas. I welcome this Bill in principle and I would like us to work constructively on it. I am disappointed, as a member of the infrastructure committee, that a decision was taken to waive pre-legislative scrutiny on this. I would like a commitment from Government that the legislative guillotine will not be used for amendments on this legislation because this is really important. We have to get this right. The slow pace of infrastructure delivery is a huge barrier to the provision of housing in particular. When it comes to legislating for critical infrastructure, I take a bit of a Victorian view on these things. I believe the Legislature should authorise major infrastructural development by statute, as was done in 1925 for Ardnacrusha. In relation to this Bill, I think there is an outsized reference to or emphasis on judicial review as the primary blockage or bottleneck, when the primary bottleneck for the delivery of infrastructure in this country is the planning system and the plethora of complicated planning and consenting processes that were not actually simplified by the 2024 Planning and Development Act. Sometimes it feels like the planning system in this country is a bit like a multi-stage obstacle course as opposed to a facilitator of national development. The Draghi report highlighted that we have some of the longest permitting processes in Europe for onshore wind projects for example. The thing identified as a key bottleneck for renewable energy was the long and complex permitting process. I see in the infrastructure Bill that public bodies will be required to do everything in their power to accelerate approval of projects designated as essential by the Government. I have no issue with that in principle. The issue I have is that we have not really had clarity in real terms as to what that will actually mean. We know that our economy places significant pressure on water. We have a lot of water-intensive industries like pharmaceuticals and data centres in particular. I do not want to see a situation where fossil fuel infrastructure or data centres could potentially be designated as critical infrastructure. While I welcome the intention of the Bill to deal with fragmented decision-making and the imposition of binding duties on public bodies to prioritise, co-ordinate and resource critical projects I have significant concerns about the disapplication of section 15 of the 2015 climate Act. Judicial reviews for climate have a high degree of success because of real procedural flaws by regulatory bodies in complying with their climate obligations. It brings me back to the 2020 Supreme Court judgment, which deemed that the 2017 national mitigation plan for climate was quashed for being too vague. The decision to bypass pre-legislative scrutiny for this really undermines our ability as legislators to ensure it is legally sound and robust. I would like the Minister to address how this Bill intersects with our obligations under Aarhus. It seems to me from a lot of the media commentary and utterances from Government that it is excessively focused on judicial review and limiting public participation and legal challenges, as if they are the main or only cause of the failure to deliver infrastructure in this country. The fact is that we have the slowest regulatory and planning processes in the European Union. That is not a new problem. That is the Government's problem. It is a direct consequence of this Government's more than ten years in power. Six years have passed since Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael effectively consummated their marriage. In that time, we have had budget overruns and delays. We have had a national development plan that was published without listing the projects, yet the Bill itself talks about listing critical infrastructure projects. As a member of the infrastructure committee, we have met with countless witnesses over the past 11 months, and they have all said the same thing. There is a need for multi-annual funding, the need to give way to the common good, the need to speed up decision-making and there is a shortage of properly trained construction workers.

We know that the explanatory note for this Bill says that its purpose is to allow Government to designate specific infrastructure projects or programmes that it considers to be critical. The Bill does not reference specific projects or programmes. It provides Government with the power to designate projects or programmes as critical infrastructure. Section 3 provides the Government the statutory powers to designate a project as a critical infrastructure project or programme, done in this case by Deputy Chambers as the Minister for public expenditure. In practice, it represents a major shift towards speed and centralised co-ordination in infrastructure delivery. However, there are major concerns with this Bill given the history of infrastructure and the parochial nature of politics in this country. There are many concerns in terms of the reduction in transparency. We have seen pre-legislative scrutiny waived and a limitation on public participation. Overburdening of agencies is another issue. We have seen that MARA is totally overrun given the amount of regulatory work to be done there. It creates opportunities for political influence over project prioritisation. We as a nation have seen the damage political influence has caused when it comes to major infrastructural projects. In my constituency a number of critical pieces of infrastructure simply need to be fast-tracked, which have been neglected over the years. These included the Oilgate to Rosslare motorway, which is the final piece of the jigsaw from Larne to Rosslare Harbour. Rosslare Europort has seen an increase of 350% in freight traffic since Brexit. Families have been left waiting almost two decades for movement and development on this. Their land has been sterilised and stigmatised. I have dealt with families who for the want of 2 yards to maybe build a home on their land have been told it is part of the overall project for the motorway, and I have dealt with people whose homes and businesses have been left. Despite this, these critical pieces of infrastructure have been delayed and delayed. We see the offshore renewable energy potential off the coast of Rosslare. It is critical if we are to meet our 2030 commitments. This week we have seen that if we are to break our dependence on fossil fuels, we need offshore renewable energy as part of critical infrastructure. There is also the area of education and my colleague from Waterford spoke about the South East Technological University. We need the development of the Wexford campus as part of that. The money was made available in 2015 to purchase the site and it was only concluded in the past six months. Wexford is one of the largest counties in Leinster. It is bigger than Waterford or Carlow in population terms but it is left behind. In principle, this Bill is excellent but it leaves the door open to parochial politics whereby certain Ministers can pick certain projects and leave the rest behind.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on the Bill. As Chairman of the Joint Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery, I welcome this particular discussion and look forward to this legislation going to the committee. As Chairman, I will ensure we have a thorough, effective and detailed discussion on Committee Stage. We will have ample time for any issues that need to be raised, discussed or teased out at the committee where we can get into the specifics of the legislation. I welcome and support this important Bill that creates a new fast track approval process for critical infrastructure. Under this new legislation, every public body will be required to do everything within its power to accelerate approval of any designated project to the maximum extent possible. Public bodies will also be required to co-operate with each other. That is going to be a new process for many organisations but that is essentially how the Bill will operate. They will be able to co-ordinate, prioritise and sequence their duties with other public bodies and allocate any administrative, technical or decision-making resources necessary for a rapid approval of a project or programme. The Bill specifically identifies critical infrastructure in the energy, transport and water sectors as a priority. This infrastructure is necessary to underpin all other development in the State from housing, which is the most important infrastructure we need, to other economic and social investments. A recent Government circular established a mandatory cross-government process for the rapid reporting of court decisions that may affect the delivery of critical national infrastructure. This ensures early identification of judicial decisions that could influence how future infrastructure projects are planned or assessed and delivered. That is important because not every Government agency watches what every other agency is doing and there could be a court decision that could be relevant across the board and it is important we have a centralised area to keep a close eye on and have the information on these matters. The Government will designate individual projects or programmes as critical infrastructure by order to be laid before Dáil Éireann, meaning every specific project will have to be laid before this House and if a resolution annulling the order is passed within the next 21 sitting days, the order shall be annulled. There will, therefore, be an opportunity for these to be debated in the House. I stress this is about national infrastructure to help in the three areas I have mentioned. We cannot get into fixing every pothole using this legislation. That is not the intention. Everybody in the House, including me, could draw up a list of two dozen critical pieces of infrastructure that are required in our counties but if this legislation is to be effective, we cannot swamp these public bodies with 50, 60, 70, 80 or 100 critical projects because which of them would the public bodies prioritise? The essence of successfully implementing legislation will be to strategically concentrate on key projects that will help delivery of housing and other infrastructure such as water services that have been mentioned. If we are focused on what we do, we can get a lot done but it is important we do not overstretch all the public bodies beyond their ability to deliver these projects. It is also important that we simplify and streamline the regulatory and consenting process. Many Deputies have mentioned this and they must work together collectively. For example, in a recent report I read, there was reference to several consenting bodies and regulatory bodies, and they have to work together in co-operation rather than in individual silos. The ones in that report were the Commission for Regulation of Utilities, Environmental Protection Agency, Maritime Area Regulatory Authority, An Coimisiún Pleanála and National Parks and Wildlife Service. Every one of those has a specific role to fulfil backed up by legislation, but part of what is behind this is to make them sit down together on projects that can affect those various agencies, not for each one of them to do it in sequence so that in five years we have reached the end of an approval or consenting basis. That is important. Through our engagement with the business community, I understand many people are furious at the delays and the time major capital projects take. Many people cannot build a home because of the lack of infrastructure. Motorists are stuck in traffic jams for hours when they need to get to work on time or get children to school and we need the infrastructure for all these areas that are very important for the delivery of these services. The accelerating infrastructure task force report found successive reforms over many years have significantly increased the complexity of modern infrastructure delivery. Every time we set up a new agency, it is an independent body that is only responsible to itself and its board or its line Department. It is important we have co-ordination between these bodies on an ongoing basis. In the coming months and years, Ministers will be watching all these and it is important that there will be ongoing reporting by the Minister for public expenditure to ensure they are all delivering as they are required to by the Government. That will be as a result of matters laid before this Dáil. The Government is not going to do this behind the public’s back. We have various frameworks in place for consenting agencies, all of which have a value. They would not be there otherwise but we need to ensure complex and overlapping consents do not prohibit essential works being undertaken. The recent infrastructure action plan covers a lot of legal reform and regulatory simplification and I acknowledge the Minister’s work in bringing that in. The House and its Members love to complicate things when they get into detail but sometimes there can be a simple approach. We have over-complicated our lives. Every one of us knows that at local level, not to mind here at national level. We want to have co-ordination between all of these bodies. This action plan will lead to regulatory simplification, acknowledging the laws and the environmental laws that are there. Every time we delay a project, time is money. A delayed project costs more money. Whose money is it? It is the taxpayers' money. It is not in the interests of this House or the people who elected us to this House to delay things unnecessarily. It is important we look after the taxpayers' money wisely in all of these areas. This issue of judicial reviews has been mentioned. The number of such reviews has increased substantially in recent years. We are all familiar with that. Wind farms and renewable energy have been mentioned. We have been all been at meetings where objectors, who have the right to object, say that their approach will be to object at local authority level and to An Bord Pleanála, and then, regardless of what happens there, to go for a judicial review and go to the High Court. They hope that this will take seven or eight years and the developers will have gone away by then. Most of us, if we are honest, will say that we have attended meetings where people have said openly and publicly, before a single plan has been put on the table, that they will delay it for seven or eight years and then they will go away. That is no way to run the country. What has been proposed here is proportionate and reasonable in the circumstances. I am very pleased that the National Development Finance Agency, NDFA, will have a key role in providing advice to various Government bodies, rather than each Government body when it has a project having to go away and get its own consultants to do it. There will be a repository of information available to the NDFA, which is appearing before the committee I will chair tomorrow as part of this ongoing work. We have a specific Oireachtas committee dealing with infrastructure, which we have never had before, so there is an opportunity there. Any Member of this House or the Seanad is welcome to attend any of our meetings, which happen every week. We have had a series of meetings with agencies such as Uisce Éireann and Bord Gáis. All of the organisations mentioned today have appeared and given their views to our committee over the past several months. That will continue so there is an ample forum in this House to grill any one of those organisations. I encourage people who are of a mind to do so, and have the time to do so, to come to tomorrow's meeting with the NDFA, which will have a key input to make to this entire process. It will be more efficient to have a centralised repository of skills in an area rather than every Department having to go it alone. I expect that the Committee Stage debate next week will be thorough, detailed and very effective. I look forward to it. There have been legitimate comments that we did not have pre-legislative scrutiny on this Bill. It has already been said by people in this House that it is a very short, simple Bill. That has already been said by Members of the Opposition during the past hour, and I agree with it. As Chairman of the committee, it is my honest belief that if we had done pre-legislative scrutiny, we would be inviting people in to listen to them from now until the recess in June or July; we would come back next September or October for a draft report; we might have a final report by next October; and all of this could delay the critical infrastructure legislation by six months. I believe this legislation is important. We need to get on with it, with proper Oireachtas scrutiny, but we do not need to delay it unnecessarily. As has been said here, we can quote all the delays we like all over the country and we can refer to everybody who causes those delays. If the Oireachtas started its work on this legislation by delaying its implementation by six months, it would not send a good signal. We are better to do our detailed work as we would normally do on Committee Stage. Every organisation that could have been expected to come in as part of pre-legislative scrutiny has already appeared, or will be appearing, before our committee in the normal course of events in the weeks and months ahead. I am satisfied that the legislation, when it is passed, will be effective. All I will say to the Government is that when the legislation is completed I ask the Minister, Deputy Chambers, to monitor progress on a monthly basis to make sure he is satisfied all the targets are being delivered on.

Under the helm of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael, critical deficits have opened across almost all sectors from transport to housing, water, energy infrastructure, healthcare and our digital systems. Successive Governments have allowed dangerous gaps to open between the Ireland this Government claims we are and our critical infrastructure that we just cannot rely on. Under Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the remaining Independents who support them, critical deficits are far from being the exception. They are visible, they are the norm and, increasingly, they are putting ordinary people and their health at risk. Successive Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael Governments have produced critical infrastructure, much of it designed and constructed decades ago, that has totally failed to keep pace with Ireland's growth and has, to date, squandered most of its potential. The reality is that we are asking systems that were built for a smaller, slower, less complex Ireland to carry too heavy a load. Those systems are already buckling under the pressure and they are starting to fail. I will take transport as an example. Congestion is not a rush-hour issue; it is the result of structural failures of this Government, no matter what part of the transport network you examine. Roads are in a state of disrepair. They are over capacity and not safe. Rail networks are operating at the absolute limits of what ageing signalling and rolling stock can handle. Commuters are regularly packed like sardines on platforms as they wait for overcrowded trains that cannot be relied on to turn up on time. Public transport projects, where they exist, have often been delivered late and over budget, or else scaled back to get them across the line. For many parts of rural Ireland, public transport is totally non-existent. The result is lost time, lost productivity and a daily tax on people's lives, especially those who have no alternative but to commute for long distances because housing is unaffordable near to where the jobs are. This brings me to housing, which in itself is a form of critical infrastructure. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have treated housing as a market problem for far too long, rather than as the right it should be. The fundamental difference between the attitude of the Government and our attitude to housing is that the Government feels it must incentivise large developers to have very expensive, for-rent apartments on the quays in Dublin whereas we believe more social and affordable housing is required. What we need, and what people need, is a home they can call their own. It is quite simple. When people cannot live near schools, work or transport, every other system is strained: water networks, roads and emergency services all absorb the cost of that failure. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the electricity grid or in water and wastewater infrastructure. Capacity on the electricity grid has been gobbled up by data centres, leading to a ticking time bomb. Our ageing pipes leak vast quantities of treated water every day. They are operating far beyond capacity. All around County Kerry, villages like Castlegregory, Fenit, Duagh and Ballyduff - I could go on - have, in effect, what is called an Imhoff tank, which is basically a hole in the ground that has probably been there for 60 years. In all of these villages, you cannot now have infrastructure or housing built because of the age of this infrastructure, if you could call it that. Development cannot take place and communities cannot grow. In an era where one-off housing in rural areas, particularly under significant urban influence, is more difficult than ever to achieve, people cannot move into towns and villages and they cannot develop because the necessary investment in the infrastructure has not been made by this Government. I am running out of time. If we do not get this right, things could deteriorate even further and that is something Ireland cannot afford.

I want to respond to a couple of points made by Deputy Fleming. Alarm bells ring for me when the explanation for why we cannot do pre-legislative scrutiny is because we cannot do it efficiently and it might take us six months, when we are talking about a Bill that aims to make processes efficient. I did pre-legislative scrutiny in the previous Dáil when it needed to be done quickly on the housing committee and it was done in a matter of a couple of weeks. We were able to do it quickly and efficiently. The Government is saying to us that we will have an efficient process around critical infrastructure but we cannot even manage the pre-legislative scrutiny efficiently. It does not really speak to confidence in the Government's ability. I do not buy that, to be frank. Deputy Fleming said that the designations the Minister makes will be laid before the House and there will be an opportunity to debate them in the House. That is technically correct but it is a bit of stretch because to be able to debate in the House, we have 21 days to get a motion in. Most Opposition parties and groups may not have any Private Members' time in those 21 days and if we did, as the Minister knows well, we have hundreds of competing strong demands for that one time slot. To get a slot to actually debate any of these designations in the Dáil, while technically possible, will be extremely difficult to exercise. Before I get into the detail of the Bill, I will make a point about critical infrastructure. It is not just about process being more efficient. While that is important, it is also about the overall strategic priorities of the Government. The Government's overall strategic priorities when it comes to critical infrastructure have been wrong. Tá na tosaíochtaí míchearta ag an Rialtas. I will give an example. If you fly into any airport, you get a good sense of the priorities in that country or city. If you fly into Vienna, you see a lot of affordable housing. If you fly into London at night-time, you see a lot of lights around all-weather sports facilities they have invested in. If you fly into places in Spain, you see all the wind farms which mean they have cheaper electricity bills and are not as impacted by the energy crisis now as other European countries. If you fly into Dublin Airport, what you see? If you are coming up from Wicklow into Meath, Kildare and west Dublin, what really strikes you as the things that have been developed in the past ten years or so? What has been the priority of the country? You will not see it in other countries; it is data centres. The Government in its addiction to over-provision of data centres has shown where its priorities lie. That has resulted in higher energy prices for people and small businesses and in part in the crisis we are in at the moment. A more efficient process in terms of legislation is important but the priorities of the Government are important as well. Not only was there no pre-legislative scrutiny of this Bill, there was no regulatory impact assessment. Why would you want to bother with a regulatory impact assessment for a Bill like this on critical infrastructure that is all about regulation and regulatory processes? The Government just does not bother to do one. Pre-legislative scrutiny was brought in as a reform after the crash to make this Oireachtas much better at doing its job because there was a recognition across the Dáil and the Oireachtas that we needed to do our job as legislators better yet here we go - we will not bother doing it. Either you will not bother doing it or you do not want the assessment to be done. Overall, we strongly support the intention of the Bill. It is very important that we deliver critical infrastructure as efficiently and effectively as possible. We absolutely agree with that intention. For housing, healthcare, education, the climate infrastructure we need, public transport and reducing the cost of living and of doing business, it is important that critical infrastructure is delivered efficiently. However, what rings more alarm bells for me is the section to exempt public bodies from climate laws. There has been no scrutiny of this so far. It really says something stark about the Government's approach in terms of climate action. Why is it that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael in the previous Dáil were all for this but now they are no longer in government with the Green Party, they think they can ditch these provisions? It shows a real lack of ongoing commitment to climate action. I found the Minister's comments quite extraordinary in his opening remarks. I am paraphrasing but my read of what the Minister said was to not worry because the Government will be doing the climate stuff anyway. He did not get into the point that it will not be required by law and if the Government does not do it or make serious mistakes, there will be no recourse to the courts or justice system. When the Minister gave a rationale for that exemption, he said it is because the Government does not agree with the motivations, beliefs and ideology of some of the people taking challenges in the courts. He stated "It is abundantly clear that some of these reviews are being taken for ideological reasons". That is quite an extraordinary comment for the Minister to make and I would like to know the basis for that. Who decides what is an ideological judicial review and what is not? Obviously the Minister has decided. I think there is an over-provision and over-concentration of data centres in this country but I would not say that if people engaged in data centre lobbying or businesses wanted to have access to justice, they should be denied it because of their ideological position. I would not say that about anyone. Who decides what is an ideological position that is acceptable or not? The Minister has decided that some of the people taking court cases have ideological positions and therefore should not have these provisions in law. That is quite an extraordinary approach to take. Access to justice is a fundamental part of our process. Independent judicial arbitration and who has access to it should not be decided on by the Minister withdrawing these rights because he thinks some people have ideologies. That is very arbitrary. Judicial activism has been given a bad rap by this Government. As for a lot of the rights we enjoy, such as workers' rights, equal pay for women, equality for the LGBT community, disabled people, the environment and the clean air we breathe, some came from civil society campaigning over the years. Some came from the Oireachtas but some were driven by judicial activism. We live in a better country and a better world because of it and we should not try to write that out of our history. In this legislation there is a lack of transparent process around designation of what is or is not critical infrastructure. This is an issue with the Bill. I am a fan of quite simple legislation. It does not always have to be incredibly long and complex. That does not necessarily serve us well but some of the key challenges in this legislation seem to have been sidestepped by the Government. It is as if it does not know how it will define them or lay out the criteria strongly or clearly or have transparency around the decision-making process and so just will not cover them in the Bill at all. I am not asking for a complex process but there are no provisions or safeguards in the Bill, for example, to stop a Minister prioritising projects that would benefit their own constituency over other projects that serve the national interest. It is critically important that legislation holds water no matter who is in government or what sort of a Minister we have. We have had decades of Ministers favouring projects in their constituencies - not all Ministers but we have had decades of it. This Bill does not give any safeguards and there is no real transparency around designation. Laying it before the Oireachtas does not give proper democratic insight or input. The lack of safeguards needs to be addressed. We have not had any analysis from the Minister, and of course we did not have pre-legislative scrutiny, on why previous critical infrastructure legislation has not worked so there is a lack of potential learning. It was promised, for example, that the strategic housing development legislation would fast-track housing; it did the opposite. It created delays. The Bill fails to address many acute challenges and fundamental problems such as the need to build up State capacity. Of course it is not all about the legislative process but outsourcing so many functions to the private sector has reduced State capacity and has been costly and inefficient. Alongside this Bill, it is important that much stronger capacity is developed in really good community engagement. If there is efficient legislation and good community engagement, we could do much better in delivering the critical infrastructure we desperately need. We will table amendments. I hope the Minister considers them constructively.

I am extremely concerned by what the Minister and this Government are doing in the area of climate action and now in the area of climate law. They are dismantling years of work and future generations will bear the cost. Section 7 of the Critical Infrastructure Bill provides for a disapplication of section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 in specific cases. Simply put, this means now that large infrastructure projects carried out in transport, energy, water and wastewater will no longer have to comply with section 15 of the climate Act. This is an incredible thing to put into legislation. Section 15 places an obligation on public bodies to prioritise climate concerns while carrying out their functions, so the Critical Infrastructure Bill will exempt transport infrastructure, energy systems and water and wastewater projects from climate obligations. It will disapply climate law from some of the biggest potential sources of long-term emissions and the most emission-intensive projects that are carried out by the State. The climate Act was introduced because there is an acceptance that Government decisions have consistently failed to deliver emissions reductions without legal obligations. We all remember how difficult it was, the amount of work that went into it in the last Dáil and the amount of consultation involved in bringing together the climate Act. Now, with the stroke of a pen, the Minister is going to disapply it for large-scale projects. What the Minister is doing is saying these climate considerations are no longer an option and he will override them when they no longer fit the Government's agenda. What the Minister is doing with section 7 is gutting the core purpose of the climate Act. While every day public bodies will be expected to cut emissions and meet their climate objectives, as they should and as is intended in the climate Act and was the intention of the then Government and every Deputy who voted for that Act in the previous Dáil, huge infrastructure projects will now be given a free pass. This is not about paperwork or simplifying procedures. Transport infrastructure, energy systems and water and wastewater projects all shape our emissions for decades. They lock in carbon pathways long after Governments move on. How can the Minister propose setting aside climate laws for these projects? We cannot have a climate Act that is optional for big projects. That just will not work. Climate change will not stop because big projects must advance. What comes next? If this Bill becomes law, what is to stop the Government exempting housing projects, agriculture infrastructure or industrial policy from climate law in future? If the Minister creates a precedent for climate law to be disapplied for strategic reasons, the integrity of the whole Act is undermined. To make matters worse, the Bill is being progressed without pre-legislative scrutiny by the infrastructure committee. This is a slap in the face to Members of the Oireachtas and a serious undermining of parliamentary processes. The Government is constantly talking about future proofing and climate resilience. The Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, is constantly talking about how climate change is an existential crisis we are facing, yet day in, day out the Government is acting completely contrary to this. It is sidelining climate action and hollowing out our climate law. This will be felt for generations to come. Ireland will fall further behind in its climate obligations and the public will pay the economic and environmental price.

I have been researching and critically analysing Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael's infrastructure policy for almost 20 years. In fact, I did my PhD on it, specifically on infrastructure and how it was developed during the Celtic tiger period. Back then, 20 years ago, the key policy of Fianna Fáil was to have public-private partnerships deliver infrastructure through new ways which were, essentially, handing our public infrastructure over to big global infrastructure providers that saw infrastructure as a commodity through those public-private partnerships in wastewater, social housing and transport. It utterly failed and we then had a decade of austerity, during which the Government failed again and cut back capital projects. In this new Bill there is no step change away from this outsourcing and the overreliance on the private model of delivery of infrastructure. Why are we in the situation we are with the children's hospital? Why are we in the situation we are with the lack of infrastructure? It is in large part because the State has handed over the delivery of infrastructure to the private sector. We have local authorities and we can go through our State agencies. The Bill is incredible to me, and in reading through it and the explanatory memorandum I wonder whether the Minister is having a laugh. He is saying that what this is about is getting public bodies to prioritise critical infrastructure, and the other part is about getting public bodies to co-operate and co-ordinate with each other. For crying out loud, Fine Gael has been in government for 15 years, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have been in government together for six years, and this is what the Minister has, a Bill to get public bodies to prioritise critical infrastructure. Why are they not doing that already? Why does the Government not have public bodies doing this? I believe this is a smokescreen. It is a fig leaf to put across the idea that it is doing something. It is not going to fundamentally change how infrastructure is delivered in this country. It is going to be the same model of reliance on the private sector, the same model of reliance on outsourcing and the same chronic underfunding of infrastructure. A message came from my constituency office today about creches, with regard to parents trying to find creches in the constituency but not being able to do so. Where is the increase in funding for crèches in this? The Luas to Finglas is a transport project in my constituency. It is delayed and not due to be delivered by 2030. This is not because of a lack of prioritisation by public bodies; it is because of a lack of funding allocated to the project. The Minister should be honest. This is not a step change in how we are going to see critical infrastructure delivered in this country. As I said, to a certain extent the Bill appears to be a smokescreen to allow the Government to pretend it is doing something. Nothing has fundamentally changed, however. If we want to deliver critical infrastructure, particularly housing, rapidly, why do we not set up a State construction company with the capacity to directly deliver, rather than relying year after year on a private sector that is failing to deliver, that is not being prioritised and that is taking the State for a ride in terms of value for money?

It should be lost on no one, today of all days, that climate change and the associated issues in energy security, water infrastructure and transportation infrastructure are of paramount importance for the future of our country. I welcome the Government focusing on the acceleration of the delivery of such infrastructure so we can meet this climate century and navigate it more securely for the shared prosperity of our people. However, the Bill may enable travel in the opposite direction. I thank in particular the Oireachtas Library and Research Service for the comprehensive Bill digest, through which I was able to scrutinise the legislation and specifically section 7 of the Bill, which allows for the provisions of section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 to be disapplied. As the Bill digest states, contrary to the Minister's opening remarks, this in effect would mean exempting critical infrastructure projects from being consistent with the most recent climate action plans and strategies, adaptation frameworks and plans, and national climate objectives, including mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. It is notable that the infrastructure in the Bill is circumscribed to energy, water and transport but it further defines infrastructure as any that enables essential facilities and systems of the State to function effectively and is not limited to these areas. Combined with the powers of section 3 to entrust the Government with designated orders, this definition effectively allows the Government, or any future Government, to designate any project or programme as a critical infrastructure project, public or private. Additionally, should the fast-track, one-stage planning process in the Planning and Development Act 2024 not yet executed be executed, we may be in the extraordinary situation where this Bill effectively allows the Government to unilaterally designate any piece of infrastructure, private or public, in the State as a critical infrastructure project to be fast-tracked beyond all normal processes, entirely exempt from climate requirements, with virtually no oversight or recourse by the Oireachtas or anyone else. This seems problematic. I will even go so far as to say it may be constitutionally suspect and may be challenged in the courts. In practical terms, this would mean the Government could fast-track a data centre, an industrial farm or an oil rig. Could the Bill perhaps be used to override all normal processes for the proposed LNG terminal in Kerry? If that is the case, it is deeply concerning. I hope the Minister, the Department, the committee on Committee Stage and others consider the balance of climate action carefully before proceeding with the Bill.

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to this debate. I begin by acknowledging the events of the past week. A lot of people have been in contact with me and my office and I acknowledge their concern. People are understandably worried. The ongoing war in Iran is having real and serious consequences for households and businesses across the country and the pressures of energy costs, fuel costs and supply chains are being felt everywhere. It would be wrong to pretend otherwise. I welcome the Government's €750 million support package approved by Dáil Éireann today. For context, it is one of the most significant responses in Europe and more than ten times the level of support being provided by the Northern Ireland Executive, for example. The package is a meaningful intervention that will help shield families and businesses from the worst of what is coming. However, we have to be honest. The months ahead will be difficult and challenging. There are no easy solutions to a crisis of this scale, and people deserve straight talk rather than false reassurance. I also want to say something about the protests we have seen. The right to protest is fundamental, and I respect it absolutely. I thank the gardaí who had to operate in challenging environments trying to balance legitimate protest with the need to ensure critical supplies continued to move. I also thank our front-line workers, the retail workers, transport workers and many others who quietly kept things going over the past week. Their contribution should not go unnoticed. Clearly, we all want to see this war end. Every day it continues brings more suffering in the region and here at home. If this crisis has underlined anything, it is how exposed we remain as a country when critical infrastructure is not in place at the scale we need it. That is why this Bill matters and that is why I support it. The case for accelerating offshore wind development has never been stronger. We need to move quickly and with urgency. I am on record in this House as saying I felt that the previous Minister with responsibility for energy did not treat energy security or, indeed, expanding public transport with the urgency it required. This is an opportunity to correct that. We need to be ambitious. There is an undeniable case for enhanced supports for solar, which needs to be deployed quickly and deliver real resilience at household and community level. We also need to have a serious national conversation about what happens post-Corrib gas, for example. When Corrib runs out, possibly next year, we are simply going to become completely dependent on imported gas with no domestic alternative whatsoever. That is not a credible energy policy. We need energy security and certainty and we need a robust plan. Legislation alone will not get us through this. What will, though, is willingness across the House and across the country to face hard choices honestly together. This Bill is a step in that right direction.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this important Bill as a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Infrastructure and National Development Plan Delivery. I welcome some of the initiatives the Minister has taken such as the introduction of an accelerating infrastructure task force and the work it is doing to try to ensure we highlight this at every single level. It is important we hold every public body to account on this and that there is co-operation. It is a major cultural shift, however, and I hope we can achieve that cultural shift because, in many ways, culture is intangible. It is immeasurable until we see delivery. Unfortunately and regrettably, in this country today, when we talk about infrastructure delivery, we talk about decades rather than years. That is simply unacceptable. I see it across the board in my constituency, whether it is a library in Edenderry, a hospice in Tullamore or a primary care centre in Birr. We really need to change that attitude. We see today the need we have to think differently and innovatively wit the likes of modern methods of construction and abnormal loads. We have a conflict where local authorities are preventing abnormal loads and not building plans for roads to specification to accommodate them. That is something that has to be addressed with urgency. Other speakers mentioned and referenced energy. We saw what happened at the weekend. I understand the pain and difficulty and the challenges many have with the cost of living today. It is a real highlight and alarm for us that we now need to treat energy as critical infrastructure. In terms of its importance, the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, has done exceptional work in this area, but we really need to apply urgency from all of government in this area. We have been to the fore on renewable energy in my county and we have delivered. We generated more energy in January alone than any other county. However, we cannot take it for granted that there will be continuous buy-in from communities in this area. Community benefit funds must be modified in order that they can leave a lasting legacy and are not just investing in the likes of jerseys and scoreboards in local sporting clubs. If that is not sorted out and clarified and wind energy guidelines provided, we are going to lose the people on this one. That is my concern. I ask the Minister and Government to prioritise this in relation to guidelines. On private energy investment, the feedback I receive from the regulators with oversight of energy in the country is that they are not working with private investors. They are not coming to the table and collaborating with them. We need to move away from this culture of what people cannot do to advising private investors and private developers of what they can do. If that does not happen, we are going to continue to see decades for a window of development. On the grid update, what we are doing with buildings that are put aside for PR 6 is very important. However, maybe separately, Deputy Devlin mentioned our reliance on gas internationally. We are essentially relying on international nuclear power from other states. In reality, we need to start that discussion now because every day that we can move away from a dependence on fossil fuels and develop our renewable infrastructure will reduce our dependence on it and have an impact on price. One area that has become an absolute minefield and disaster in terms of development is the use of climate compliance as an effective tool to hamper progress. Far too often, whether it is on a local authority level or in the judicial courts, we hear about snails, mussels and bats and how important they are. I have no issue with any of those, but when it floods a town or delays development from an economic perspective or delivery of an industrial site, housing development or water infrastructure, it is simply not acceptable. We really need to find a way of overcoming these challenges so that we can get on with very serious development. If that does not happen, we are still going to be here in a number of years talking about decades rather than years. This is very important legislation and I welcome it. We have to keep the momentum going and delivering this much-needed infrastructure when we have the funding and finances to work on it. I welcome and I fully support it.

I was elected for the first time in 2019 as a councillor in Dublin West in the election after the Minister. In preparation for tonight, I looked back over some of my leaflets on transport and infrastructure from that year. One referenced €1.5 billion that was ring-fenced for BusConnects that would cut journey times by 40%. Another referenced a €2 billion investment in rail to electrify and upgrade the Maynooth line to a DART service in line with the national priority to double frequency and triple capacity by 2027. Both highlighted Project Ireland 2040 and the national development plan of 2018 and how the funding had been secured and they were major infrastructural wins at the time. I talked about having the vision, the plan and the budget to finally deliver an integrated transport system for Dublin West, and it was right. The Government did have the vision, the plan and the budget. However, what my leaflet and the Government of the day both failed to appreciate were the barriers and blockages that would then emerge. BusConnects has been stuck in a legal challenge since 2024. DART+ West got planning in 2024 but two judicial reviews delayed progress. They have since been reviewed and work is to begin in late 2026-2027. Seven years on from my first political leaflet, therefore, our major transport projects have not been delivered. I am frustrated, commuters are frustrated and communities are frustrated. I know the Minister, too, is frustrated. The only acceptable response to frustration is meaningful action. That infrastructural deficit is not due to money and it is not due to a lack of strategic planning but to slow and unreliable delivery systems. We have to act to remove the systemic blockages delaying infrastructure delivery across housing, energy utilities and transport. We have to act to tackle delays due to slow and unpredictable legal and planning frameworks. We have to speed things up. We have to meet the needs of the nation from building homes to hospitals and rail lines to power lines. We have to secure Ireland's competitiveness by addressing Ireland's infrastructural deficits. These are national imperatives. For every Member of this House, they are also local imperatives. Last year, over 1,300 new homes were delivered in Dublin West, but too many residents are left waiting on infrastructure. I want BusConnects delivered. Journey times in Dublin West will only reduce if speed increases for the buses. That will only happen with the construction of a core bus corridor. Right now, it can take up to two and a half hours on the 39A for a student who lives in Ongar to get to UCD. The number 38 bus departing the city at peak times travels an average of 12.5 km/h. A professional walker might match or even beat many of our primary commuter routes. I want DART+ West delivered and more capacity in the meantime. I want 2,500 homes in the new area of Dunsink, Dublin 15, delivered by 2029. It is not under the category of critical infrastructure, but I want the Royal Canal greenway delivered. It also featured in my 2019 leaflet and has been submitted to An Coimisiún Pleanála this year. I also want to see an astro pitch in Martin Savage Park. Going forward, I want to see projects such as a new train station at Porterstown to support the new area of Kellystown, beside Clonsilla, which was also in my 2019 leaflet. I also want the proposed Blanchardstown and Tyrrelstown Luas lines envisaged under Luas 2050, the Glasnevin MetroLink station connecting DART+ West to the wider network and the expansion of grid capacity supporting businesses in the Dublin enterprise zone. All of this depends on our ability to deliver infrastructure at pace and at scale. That is why I support this Bill.

It is as clear as day to me and my constituents that Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael cannot be trusted to deliver critical infrastructure across this country. I listened to the Taoiseach last week when he spoke about the protestors putting our clean water supply at risk. He said that could not be tolerated and was against the law. I have never heard the Taoiseach speak so resolutely about the thousands of people in Kilkenny and Carlow, in places such as Castlecomer, who have gone years without clean water. How many more years must these families endure dirty water flowing through their taps every day? Those taxpayers are being treated like second-class citizens. Deputy Fleming spoke about people kicking the can down the road and delaying wind farms. The same could be said of the Government with the wind farm regulations. This Government refuses to bring out wind farm regulations at any speed, while areas are being hampered. In 2025, approximately 13% of the country's wind-generated electricity was wasted because the grid was not strong enough to carry all the power being produced. Over €1 million per day is paid back in curtailment payments. The amount of wasted renewable energy in the 13 months leading up to 31 January 2026 was estimated at a retail value of €559 million. The Government is putting the cart before the horse while communities suffer. Some €1 million or more is wasted per day. How has the Government let this happen? It is no wonder that we are paying among the highest electricity prices. All we see with Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael is short-sightedness, no ambition and little to no accountability. As a result, our housing, health, water and transport are all suffering because critical infrastructure projects, vital projects for our economy and the quality of life of people across Ireland are moving at a snail's pace.

We have a chronic lack of infrastructure in our country. The basics, such as housing, transport, school places, hospitals, grid capacity and an effective high-quality water supply, are all completely lacking in the second richest country in all of Europe. Where does the money go? It is the people's money, the tax that people pay for their work, the solidarity contributions they make to their fellow citizens in the running of the State. A graphic made by Sinéad O'Sullivan went viral over the weekend. It showed Ireland's massive wealth relative to our lack of delivery and infrastructure at a European level. Unfortunately, we are in a league of our own. We are the red dot on the chart, out on our own and well below both poorer and wealthier countries. Ireland is by far one of the richest countries in the EU, yet our infrastructure delivery is worse than that of Greece, Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, all of which are poorer on the GNI metric. All we see is the Government clapping itself on the back about fiscal prudence and running a budgetary surplus, year on year. People keep hearing from the Government benches that we are a rich country, but no one feels it. They see a country crippled by a housing crisis exacerbated by a basic lack of infrastructure. That is why I welcome measures that will speed up delivery, but experience tells me I should be very doubtful about it. The record of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael on critical infrastructure delivery is categorised by inaction, delays and bad value for people's money. The shining example is the children's hospital, which has been delayed 18 times and counting. The DART+ West project will run to Kilcock in my constituency, and not to Maynooth, as I like to remind people. I am on the infrastructural committee. I wanted pre-legislative scrutiny of the Bill. We were prepared to meet often and to meet over the holidays to do it quickly. As the chair of the committee, an Teachta Fleming, said, we have had the experts in. They tell us that it is not because of judicial reviews or environmental reasons that we are not getting infrastructure. It is the result of the Government's lack of action.

Section 7 of this Bill represents a fundamental attack on the provisions of the climate action Act passed in this House in 2021 with the support of 129 Members from the Green Party, the Labour Party, the Social Democrats, People Before Profit, Sinn Féin and, crucially, Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. Now, five years later, this Critical Infrastructure Bill means that any project that is designated as critical infrastructure will no longer have its climate impact examined. Today, the Government is seeking to repeal, by the back door, a central aspect of the climate action Act. Let me set out how the Critical Infrastructure Bill does this. Section 15 of the climate action Act 2021 puts a legal duty on public bodies to perform their actions in a manner that is consistent with the climate Act. It places a climate duty on all public bodies, including the National Transport Authority, NTA, An Coimisiún Pleanála and the Department of public expenditure. It places that duty on all public bodies. Under section 7 of this Bill, when the Minister designates a project or programme as critical infrastructure, that climate duty no longer applies. To put this in context, over Christmas, the Minister for climate, Deputy Darragh O'Brien, announced that the Government was giving up on achieving Ireland's 2030 emissions targets four years before the deadline. Today, this Bill proposes to remove the climate duty from public bodies when they are undertaking assessments of major projects in the areas of water, transport and energy. Those are the very projects that will be the most consequential to our ability to meet those climate targets. The real-life implication of section 7 is to specifically deny bodies, such as An Coimisiún Pleanála, the ability to take the climate impact of major projects into account when making decisions about granting them planning permission. It applies irrespective of whether the project has a potentially positive climate impact, such as the wind farm in the Coolglass judgment, or a negative impact, such as a new liquefied natural gas, LNG, terminal. Section 7 of the Bill will, ironically, prevent the climate benefits of some projects counting in favour of whether that project should be granted planning permission. Let us take an example. Say the NTA is trying to advance a new Luas line and there is a judicial review challenge to it on the basis that somebody does not want his or her garden to be the subject of a compulsory purchase order, CPO. The argument that in deciding to advance the project, the NTA was fulfilling its climate duty under section 15 of the climate action Act will no longer be available to the NTA because of section 7 of this Bill. While projects that will have a negative climate impact will be shielded by this Bill, the big projects that will have a positive climate impact will lose the additional legal protection that they enjoy as a result of the climate duty. Considering how damaging section 7 is, why is it being proposed? This Bill is being promoted by the Government on the basis of cutting timelines and eliminating delays. We need to speed up our planning system and there are elements in the Government's accelerating infrastructure plan that I welcomed last December. If they were in a stand-alone Bill, I would have no problem supporting it. However, the Government has produced no evidence that the climate duty is delaying infrastructure delivery. When the Minister launched the Accelerating Infrastructure Report and Action Plan in December, there was not one single reference to the climate action Act as a source of delays. I put the question to civil servants at the transport committee and the climate committee whether removing the climate duty would speed up the process and, on both occasions, the relevant civil servants were unable to say, "Yes, this will speed up the process." This evening, the Minister has indicated he is advancing section 7 because of judicial reviews. Can he enumerate the judicial reviews that have been taken on the basis of section 15 to date? Will he list them for us? Section 7 is not about speeding up the delivery of infrastructure. It is about repealing the climate action Act by the back door and protecting carbon intensive projects, the very projects that have caused our existing high levels of emissions as a country, from public scrutiny. No pre-legislative scrutiny was permitted on this Bill, despite its huge implications for climate and planning policy. Therefore, in place of PLS, I will ask the Minister a few questions. Can he confirm that a strategic infrastructure project can only cover a project being proposed by a State body or agency and cannot cover a privately-funded project? Will he state whether he intends for data centres to fall within the definition of what could be designated as critical infrastructure? Can he confirm that a direction under section 6(2) of the Bill cannot include a direction to a local authority or An Coimisiún Pleanála to grant or reject planning permission for a specific project? In his conclusion, the Minister spoke about judicial reviews being taken for ideological reasons. This Bill represents an act of gross irresponsibility but I recognise it is entirely consistent with the approach the Government has taken since it assumed office last January because there is ideology at play here. A clear ideology is articulated across Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents. It is to lessen, undermine, defund and reverse climate action whenever it gets the opportunity. As I said when I spoke on the confidence motion and on the Government's retreat from the carbon tax earlier today, this Government has demonstrated it does not possess the belief in our energy transition and the decarbonisation of our economy to make the case for the change convincingly to the Irish people. This Bill is one more articulation of that ideology which lies at the heart of this Government.

The supposed purpose of the Bill is to speed up the delivery of infrastructure and get various different bodies to work together. I would welcome any genuine attempt to simplify planning and speed up infrastructure delivery, which takes forever and a day to get moving, to deliver it on time and at the target cost while environmental laws and regulations are not ridden roughshod over. However, the Bill has all the hallmarks of being about that. It is important that infrastructure delivery be accelerated and that it be brought in on time and on budget but sections 2, 3, 5 and 6 provide that the Minister can give directions to relevant bodies. Section 7 is the eye-opener where it disapplies section 15 of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act to designated projects. When we had previous infrastructure legislation back in the 2000s, it was declared that it was only for public projects, but it turned out to be for private projects so it looks like data centres and everything else are included. That is no way to put public infrastructure in place. We need to do everything efficiently, but not at the cost of everything else and of rubbing out local democracy and riding roughshod over good environmental laws. It does nothing to improve any of that. In fact, it is quite the opposite. I will turn to County Laois for a moment. The Minister for local government notified the local authority in Laois that he wants 5,000 more homes in the county. That is grand, but what he did not say was what infrastructure would be put in. Portlaoise, which has been targeted for a lot of that growth, needs a new primary school, which Ministers have told me in the House we do not need, despite the fact that hundreds of children are being bussed all over the county to school because there are no school places for them in Portlaoise, including the children on the estate where I live. Laois is a relatively small county but 12,000 people are commuting out of it every morning to work, according to a local authority survey. Childcare cannot be accessed. Childcare places simply are not available in most of the county. We need one of the centres the Government has planned to deliver directly urgently in Laois. We could do with all eight in Laois and we would have just about enough. On wastewater facilities, I outlined in the House a few months ago that a number of towns and villages need wastewater and water treatment facilities and for water supply to be accelerated if we are going to have houses in them. Towns and villages such as Ballinakill, Borris-in-Ossory, Durrow, Ballylynan, Rathdowney, Mountmellick, Graiguecullen and so on are all short of infrastructure. The courthouse in Portlaoise has not been delivered. We are still one of the nine counties without a domestic abuse refuge in 2026, and families and particularly women and children are being sent all over the place because we simply do not have the facility for them in the county. This is not good enough. The Bill does not address any of that. I have real concerns about this. Critical infrastructure legislation was brought in in the 2000s and I recall arguing on local radio with Deputy Seán Fleming about it at the time. I was a local councillor and I recall pointing out what was going to happen and what it would do to destroy local democracy and ride roughshod over good planning rules. The Bill is being presented without pre-legislative scrutiny. I have huge concerns about this. I would like the Minister to bring one issue to the attention to the Minister for local government. If he is going to demand all these houses are built in Laois, we will need infrastructure. There is no orbital route in Portlaoise. The Portlaoise northern orbital route is the number one priority, along with the Mountmellick link road, which will shorten the route for commuters so that people and particularly trucks will not have to travel as far. They are needed. We cannot have houses without that infrastructure. Where will the houses be built in Laois? Are they going to be built in fields with boreens going up to them or something? That number of houses cannot be put in without infrastructure. I have outlined some of what is needed. It is grand for the boys and girls in the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in the Custom House to draw up these figures and send them down to the county manager and tell him to get the councillors and officials to provide this. It cannot be done if we do not have the infrastructure. This is where we are falling down. A funding package was announced for the national development plan a few months ago and Laois was ignored in it, despite all the promises before the election. That is where we are.

Bomaite amháin. We have lost the clock. The Deputy has six and a half minutes. I will indicate two and one minutes with my fingers.

In principle, the idea of getting State bodies to co-ordinate to accelerate the delivery of critical infrastructure and removing unnecessary obstacles to its development is a good one. I have concerns about the legislation but I would love to know whether it might be helpful in dealing with an issue in my constituency. This gets to the heart of my anxieties and concerns about what the Government's real motives and objectives are. I have raised a number of times the town centre in Cherrywood, which is the biggest residential development in the country. The entire development was really predicated on there being a town centre so you did not have to get in your car. You could walk everywhere in ten minutes because there would be community facilities, shop facilities and all of the rest of it. The developers built all of the houses and made a lot of money. They are still flipping properties and they are still getting rezonings and changes to the SDZs. Whatever developers ask for, they get from the State. They have made a lot of money but for the town centre, which the people who have moved in there need, as well as the amenities and critical structure, there is nothing. Well, sorry, there is one Tesco Express and a big hole in the ground. The developers do not want to build the town centre because it is not really profitable for them. They are building houses and flipping properties after they got planning permission. They have started to sell properties again after getting a recent upzoning of the SDZs at higher densities. That is more money for them but they do not want to build the town centre. The Minister should tell me whether this will help get the developers to deliver the town centre. They will not even build a bridge from one part of Cherrywood to the other part, which is needed to link the two together, because it is not profitable for them. They are allowed to get away with this. We have been screaming about it, the residents have been screaming about it and they are allowed get away with it. That is the sort of knocking heads together and getting Departments together I would like to see. Will the Government do something about that? Here is another bit of co-ordination. In the same area where there is all this residential development, we need AstroTurf pitches and sports facilities. The clubs are crying out for them. They cannot get money or AstroTurf pitches for love nor money from the council, even though there is all of this residential development. Then, I hear that private developers have decided in the Cherrywood site that they want to build two ice hockey rinks and a convention centre for about €240 million. They want rezoning for it, which they got. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael councillors voted for it and the developers have asked the State for I do not know how much and the State will not even tell me. I have asked two parliamentary questions and the Department will not tell me for how much it has been asked for a private development for an ice hockey stadium. Nobody in the area is asking for an ice hockey stadium. They want a town centre. They want AstroTurf pitches. They want their bridge. They want the affordable housing they were promised. They did not ask for a ice hockey rink. I am not against ice hockey, do not get me wrong, but the Government's councillors voted to give the developers the zoning they wanted and the Government will not even tell us how much money they have asked the Department for but the rumour is €60 million to €80 million. Football clubs cannot get an AstroTurf pitch, which costs less than €1 million, but we might be giving a private consortium €60 to €80 million to build ice hockey rinks that nobody asked for. That worries me but it speaks to whom the Government prioritises. When the Government says about this legislation that it wants to remove obstacles, it does not seem to be anything about that but instead it is about the objectors. The objectors are the problem and the people who put in submissions to developments are the problem and not the 90,000 planning permissions that have been given and granted for houses in this country. Property developers sit on them, however, and do not do anything with them because it is profitable to sit on them and wait for the prices to go up, stay up or they flip the properties. No, there is nothing done about that but the Government is giving out about the objectors and it does not want oversight in respect of climate obligations, that is, the disapplication of section 15. To me, that smacks of LNG. That is what I hear in respect of LNG. We do not want any of the obligations under climate legislation to impact on our ability to develop liquid natural gas infrastructure. I seriously ask the question if this will apply to private, for-profit developments? We need renewable wind resources but why is it the Government has given away all of the sites to private companies? When the wind energy and our marine resources are developed for wind energy, we get nothing from it. We are giving to international consortiums. Even the French state will own more of the wind produced off the east coast of Ireland than the people of Ireland will because the Government has given away the sites to the French state energy company. I seriously worry what the Government's motives and objectives are here. I would like to hear some soothing words of reassurance that it will actually deal with the issues but the fact is the Government hands over responsibility to private developers for so much of the infrastructure, whether it is housing, energy and of course the data centres. I mean, Jesus, by 2030, it is estimated 30% of the electricity in this country will go to the data centres. They are hoovering up the energy we are creating for the benefit of some of the wealthiest companies in the world but doing very little for employment and serving no real purpose other than to make profits for these companies. Yes, the Government should knock heads together, remove unnecessary sequential planning decisions and so on but I am seriously concerned the Government is actually just trying to remove climate obligations through the backdoor and its over-reliance or prioritisation of private developers' interests mean it will be them who benefit from it rather than the public interest.

I speak here tonight on a fascinating day in its own way. In here in the Dáil Chamber, we saw many different things happening. At the same time, this ultimately is really important legislation before us here tonight. I have seen many contributors from different sides, some positive and some negative, but it really speaks to the importance of infrastructure for us and within our own areas. Many people spoke about their own towns and their own villages because ultimately, that is the infrastructure they are all aware of. Whether it was towns like Oranmore that was mentioned, towns in Cork or the aforementioned in south Dublin, the need for infrastructure with housing all across their areas is key. As a country, one thing we probably have failed to keep up with is the delivery of key infrastructure in Ireland. We have been an economic success story and indeed, an industrial powerhouse for our size but we do not have the infrastructure we deserve. This legislation may be one small step on the road to helping deliver that infrastructure. Hopefully, this Bill will be the start of that infrastructure being delivered into the country. As a public representative in north Kildare, I see all too clearly the lack of infrastructure, be it the lack of a second bridge in Celbridge, be it the DART+ not having gone out so far or be it a need for a second bridge in Clane for which there already is a need, not to mind the need for the type of social infrastructure Deputy Boyd Barrett spoke about. There is a need for more GPs, new astro pitches and the schools we all know too well but what we are talking about here specifically is the critical infrastructure and the difficulties we have in the State in delivering it. In fairness, I heard Deputy O'Gorman asking key questions as well. All of those will be looked at and focused on. Deputy Boyd Barrett asked similar questions about the environment but at the same time, we have seen that as a country, we have got bogged down in judicial reviews and public authorities delivering what they should do. I think it was Deputy Hearne when I listened to him earlier on who said these should be basic things that should already be in place and about the idea and concept that public bodies are not speaking to each other as a matter of course and are not working each other as a matter of course. Ultimately, we are all finding to our cost they are not doing so, hence the reason there is a need for this legislation. We all know the need for key infrastructure. Indeed, we have seen the impact of where there have been difficulties with infrastructure. Only in the last week, we have seen how quickly the country can grind to a half if that infrastructure is not in place in certain ways. What we are doing here is to deliver even more of that same infrastructure. Obviously, as someone on the infrastructure committee, I have seen many of the aforementioned groups who have come to us, be it from a building perspective, a planning perspective, local authorities, Uisce Éireann or whoever they may be and we all know the range of difficulties they face in delivering their own key infrastructure. We need to ensure they have the best way of delivering it. This Government has put forward €102 billion to be spent in the next four years. That is a significant amount of money in a country that has a significant need for infrastructure. Hopefully, we will be able to deliver that in the term of this Government. I know it is a significant pressure. A key factor that ultimately will decide the fate of many of us who are on this side of the Chamber is whether we can deliver that infrastructure for the country. I hope to do so. I also hope this Critical Infrastructure Bill, not to mind its impossible imperfections or whether it does enough, is ultimately a step in the right direction. I hope it will have faster and better delivery and ensure the co-ordination and the streamlined nature of improved projects in the years ahead.

I join colleagues in underlining just how important it is that we get this Bill right. The Critical Infrastructure Bill is really important legislation for this Dáil. We in Ireland are living with the legacy of many years of underinvestment in capital infrastructure, as my colleague has said. We see it very clearly in the lack of essential flood defences in particular in so many constituencies across Ireland. My colleague, Councillor Clodagh Ní Mhuirí, has highlighted the need for climate adaptation projects at local authority level to be classified as critical infrastructure projects so that they just get done. Storm Chandra inflicted huge damage on communities. We were fortunate at the time that this storm occurred at low tide. We will not always be that lucky when it comes to flooding. Looking at the numbers, of 54 large flood defence projects deemed critical in 2018, 31 remain at preliminary design stage. How is that acceptable? Forget about climate, how is it acceptable that of 54 large projects, 31 are still in design? Ignoring the climate crisis, that is just not acceptable. When you put the climate crisis on top of it, it is even worse. We are not alone in facing those challenges. Countries across the world are recognising that we have to get a fundamental reset between planning regulation and timely delivery of really important flood defence infrastructure. Bad weather has potential to wreak havoc on communities, as we have seen, and the longer we drag our feet, the more people will suffer. Flooding is now a recurring reality for many communities in nearly all parts of this country. Homes are damaged, businesses are destroyed, victims of flooding have to put their lives back together piece by piece with some support from the State - sometimes without some support - and insurance then, of course, disappears. It is unachievable. I also agree with other speakers regarding the climate implications of the Bill. It is really important that we meet our climate obligations and we do not sidestep those. We have to square up to decarbonisation. Finally, I ask that the Aire ensure climate adaptation projects are classified as critical infrastructure so that projects and communities finally get the defences they have been waiting for for so long.

For the day that is in it, it may have won the vote of confidence but I can assure the Minister that his Government has lost the support - if it ever had it - and the confidence of the people. Public services are under huge pressure. Many services do not work properly and we see billions of hard-earned euro wasted, often due to poor planning. Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are serious wasters of public funding. Never has so much been spent to deliver so little. Much of our infrastructure is crumbling. Our housing crisis continues with 17,000 people in emergency accommodation and we have a broken planning process. A total of 22,200 children are waiting on their legal entitled assessment of needs. Critical infrastructure is not planned for or delivered. This is the legacy of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for 100 years. On this Bill in particular, waiving the pre-legislative scrutiny is a mistake. Given the Government's record of failure to deliver value for money, the Opposition is right to be critical of that. Bills should face all opportunities for scrutiny in order that we strengthen them and are not correcting a mistake after the Bill has been enacted. A concern of mine is that the Bill does not define what critical infrastructure is but rather leaves that to the gift of the Minister. When we talk about infrastructure we all have our own projects in our own areas, but talking about Limerick and the Munster region, we obviously look at the Limerick to Cork motorway. It is long promised and not delivered. They are probably the only two regional cities or second and third cities across western Europe that are not connected by motorway and it will be years before that is done. In Limerick, we recently opened the Coonagh to Knockalisheen road. It is not completed but that was over 20 years in planning and was hard fought for by the communities in Moyross in particular to get it over the line. Another piece of infrastructure that is needed in Limerick is the northern distributor road. Businesses will say they need this, as will IBEC and universities, whether the Technological University of the Shannon on one side or University of Limerick at the other side, to relieve the pressure on the north side of Limerick and south-east Clare, where it is particularly needed. It would really be an extension of the Coonagh to Knockalisheen road, and that is not even in the national development plan. It was pulled by the Green Party in the previous Government and there is no sign of it in this Government. It is an economic artery for Limerick. As I have said, it would service both universities and the business park in the Castletroy area, which are struggling. Traffic is unbelievable and we need to sort that out soon. We have people backed up on the Mackey roundabout and they cannot get off on the M7 or the motorway to access Limerick. Bus services in Limerick, where they do exist, are unfortunately sometimes not reliable. Sometimes they are non-existent. One example of that is the Condell Road in the city. I have raised that before. We have a bus lane in that area. The bus lane has been there for a number of years but there is actually no local bus service on it. We have built hundreds of local authority houses and affordable houses through approved housing bodies in the area but there is no bus connection. Rail services, where they exist, are very slow and very sparse. For instance, we have the Castleconnell to Limerick city service and, for some inexplicable reason, we cannot deliver extra capacity and extra services on that. It is a no-brainer. Then we come to the issue of offshore wind. We have the unique opportunity in the Limerick area, particularly with the Foynes Port, the deepest port in the island and a huge stretch of river. As the world is moving into critical danger, if we do not deliver to make our country energy secure with the opportunity to do it through offshore wind, we will be buying that from abroad. We have the opportunity to buy our own, make ourselves energy sufficient and export wind or we can buy it back in ourselves. The HIQA report launched on 30 September had three options in it. We still do not know if we are going to build a second hospital in the mid-west. While this is committed to, there is no plan for it and no management committee set up. There is no progress on that and we do not know where we are. Trolley numbers in Limerick this week have been some of the highest we have seen across the State.

Critical infrastructure gaps in this country are probably the worst legacy of the Government over the last number of years. This country is really poorly served by infrastructure. The Government's friends in the IMF say that Ireland lags by 32% behind our peers in terms of infrastructure delivery. The biggest cost on society is the fact that this Government cannot deliver infrastructure. For ten years after the crash, the Government spending was second-last from the bottom in terms of infrastructure. Only Romania spent less on infrastructural development than this country. Therefore, there was massive capital depreciation in Ireland as a result of the lack of investment by Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael. All of that has had enormous human consequences. The national children's hospital, promised by Leo Varadkar by 2020 save an asteroid hitting the planet and to be delivered for €700 million, is still not open and has been delayed for the 18th time by the Government. A total of €300 million has been spent on metro north and not a shovel has been put in the ground as of yet. It is 20 years in the making. The Navan to Dublin rail line was promised in 1994 by the Minister's colleague, Noel Dempsey, and it will not be built any earlier than 2036. People will have started work when that project was announced and they will have retired before that project will be delivered. The damage the Government is doing to people's lives is an absolute disgrace. The lack of infrastructural development in this country is tearing at the very fabric of communities and lives. I will give an example of this in the Navan to Dublin rail line. Right now it is taking between two and three hours for people to get to and from work. I was listening to all the debates about the blockages of roads and how long it was taking for people to get around the country. I was just thinking people should just travel from Navan to Dublin for work every day and they would know exactly what it means to not be able to get to work on time. This means children are growing up with anxiety at the moment because they do not see their parents from 7 a.m. until 7 p.m. Their parents only have about 20 minutes to half an hour to put their children to bed every night. Football clubs are going without volunteers because there is simply nobody around in the evenings to be able to train their kids because of these difficulties. The lack of infrastructure has had an enormous impact on the human fabric and the community fabric right through Ireland. It was interesting that the day it was announced the national children's hospital was going to be delayed for the 18th time was the day the Government decided it was not going to have any pre-legislative scrutiny on this particular Bill. We had the enormous catastrophe that is the national children's hospital, an example of the Government getting everything wrong, and then the Government announcing a Bill and saying, "No, we don't need to actually to do pre-legislative scrutiny on this; it is not necessary." I do not know whether it is incompetence or laziness from the Government's perspective but that is what happened. It is interesting that at that moment in time the Minister for Health was asked when the hospital would open and she said the opening date is in the hands of BAM. The Minister is getting €200,000 a year in wages and she is not in control of the biggest infrastructure project delivery in Ireland. That is startling. I have read through this Bill. I do not see anything in this Bill at the moment that would speed up the national children's hospital. There is nothing in the Bill, when a project is in situ, that would actually make it happen faster. The other thing I was struck by when I read this Bill was that it looks like an Opposition party's Bill, which has no capacity to draft a Bill and put detail in it. All the Opposition parties, every now and again, introduce a Bill to generate a debate on an issue. They know it is never going to be good enough because they do not have the ability to do it. This looks exactly the same. I am amazed by how light it is, by the lack of detail and the lack of elements in it. If we cut to the key element of the Bill, it will prioritise some projects over others. This Bill will raise some projects up the queue, which will mean other projects will go down the queue. There is no net development. If we look at what is happening at the moment and the real problems - and the Minister knows this too - we have the slowest planning processing, the slowest permitting, the slowest licensing, the slowest tendering and the slowest procurement in the EU, and judicial reviews are among the slowest and most held in this State. Nothing in the Bill that changes that. There is marginal stuff about judicial review. It could be said that the climate Act change could affect some judicial reviews, but there is nothing in this Bill that, outside of that, will change the speed of that process. There is no net change in the speed of progress in the delivery of all those aspects. There are issues about co-operation and issues about different Departments. I welcome that and it is probably a good thing that is actually on a statutory legal level. I admit that, but there is no penalty if it does not happen. If the Minister tells a Department that it has to co-operate and do X,Y and Z in terms of co-ordination and it does not do it, what happens in that scenario? All of those issues are really departmental management issues anyway. There is nothing stopping a Minister in a Department addressing the elements of the planning process in more co-ordinated fashion, making sure that, for example, a planning application does not need to have 30,000 pages and does not need a van to bring it to the local authority or saying we do not need four different versions of the planning application and that we need one version of the planning application that is suitable for all the different agencies that are necessary for it to go through. There is no net capacity being put into this system in relation to this. What extra resources are going to be added? An Coimisiún Pleanála officials came before the committee and said they did not have enough staff to do the job they have to do. They did say that and the Minister should not shake his head. I was sitting in front of them in that committee. They have delays still on the applications going through. I know of builders who are waiting 20 months for their application to go through. Why? Because it is not a priority application and therefore it is not getting through. Uisce Éireann officials were in front of the infrastructure committee a little while ago. I asked them how long it is going to take Uisce Éireann to fill the gaps in the water infrastructure in this country that are currently putting blockages on the building of homes. They said 2050 is the hold up. I do not see anything in this Bill that is going to change that necessarily, other that the prioritisation, which means it is a zero-sum situation. One project moves up and another project moves down. What resources will be added to the likes of An Coimisiún Pleanála? We had representatives of the local authorities in front of the infrastructure committee and we asked did they have enough planners within the planning offices. They said they did not and that they needed another 500 planners in the system. Those are the practical elements. This is a lightweight Bill that, if we look at the enormity of the infrastructural deficit in this country and the damage it is doing to people, is an insult to that problem in reality. I am not confident. For example, most regulations are the same here. Yes, the climate Act is one change. There is no change to the habitat regulation in the context of the legislation. It is European. The Government will hold the Presidency of the European Commission for six months shortly. I have spoken to the Minister's junior Ministers and they are telling me that this regulation is a major block in the building of homes. Midleton flood defences were promised in 2015. There is an elderly gentleman at the moment in Midleton who, when it rains heavily, stays awake at night as a human water gauge to make sure the water does not get to a certain level that people die. This is not going to speed up Midleton. Midleton is a habitats directive issue. Most of the flood defences in this country are habitats. The pearl mussel in Enniscorthy is going to be comfortable on the riverbed in Enniscorthy for another 15 years. The livelihoods of the people of Enniscorthy are not going to be comfortable and this Bill is not going to make a blind bit of difference to that. The Government is going to need regulatory changes, which will need European changes too, to make sure we can get the infrastructure built in this country as well. I laughed out loud when I heard the Minister's statement about not weaponising the climate Act because it is an admission that the climate Act has been weaponised against development in this country, but who passed the climate Act? It is an admission that the Government parties did something really damaging to the development of this country.

I welcome the opportunity to speak on this. I want to be very clear that I am all for speeding up any infrastructure in the line of what Government needs to do, be that roads, rail or housing. There are a few issues. I am trying to get my head around parts of this Bill. Is this Bill solely for Government and semi-State bodies? I am asking whether some wind developer somewhere that is tormenting some community will be able to avail of that in some part of the country or is it just for Government projects, be they roads or hospitals? It would be great to get clarification on that from the Minister and his officials if that could be explained. I just cannot get my head around that. I have no problem if, in a Bill, the State needs to be able to build hospitals or build roads or whatever it needs to build quicker. However, there is one part I worry about that has been mentioned, and which I have spoken to the Minister before about, and that is the Bill seems to push the critical infrastructure up to the top of the pile to get looked at. That is my understanding of it and that is fine, but I see ordinary people out there. We need quarries, whether people like it or not, to be able to build infrastructure. Let nobody cod themselves about that. There are people waiting who have applications in with An Bord Pleanála and all they get is a letter saying it is another few months gone, and another few months. The way they treat ordinary, private persons that way is disgraceful. With the best will in the world, we get that when an application for planning is put in, it is good to get it to the top of the pile. If we continue with the habitats directive in its present form, God help any Minister because there is a rigmarole they will have to go through. I have been dealing with the habitats directive for the last 20 years or more. What has happened with the habitats directive is that it started off as a directive. It then started going into the European Court of Justice, ECJ, and it started to put us in straitjacket after straitjacket. With the best will in the world to any Department, we get frustrated when things are not delivered. If we go back a few years ago and down to Lough Talt, when Jerry Grant was in Irish Water at the time, we had to go to Europe for an Article 6(3) or Article 6(4) imperative reasons of overriding public interest, IROPI, exception. No matter how you go about it, it is going to take three or four years, and it will continue unless we get some legislation put in place. I have mentioned this before to Ministers. I remember when Eamon Ryan was here, at the time we needed the jet engines to basically keep the power on or to have backup. I remember it was the Bord na Móna Bill, I think, that came in here one night. It was a Bill that basically went over all the habitats directive, and you could drive on. I think it was for three years and it could be renewed again, or whatever. Environmental impact assessments, EIAs, appropriate assessments, AAs, and all this craic we have to go on with would not have had to be done. He was able to get that legislation through because, obviously, there was an amber light on our electricity situation at the time. The legislation was put through here one night. For a Government seeking to build housing projects, and for the likes of Irish Water if it needs sewers and water, if we do not have sewers, water and roads, we are not going to build anything. That is what will happen if we do not go down that road. It will probably mean a clash with Europe, because even in Germany a snail was holding up things. I remember what happened at Lough Talt that time. There is the madness that is going on in some of this. A certain type of snail was supposed to have been in Lough Talt. I do not know how many years it had been gone for, but it was still necessary to do all the rigmarole. The project was being blocked. This was even though the pipe was coming out and Sligo County Council at the time was putting out the water daily. Irish Water was turning that pipe not near the lake, but 800 m away. It was going using the water, but it had to get an extraction licence. It was being blocked from getting that extraction licence. I spoke to Jerry Grant one evening across the road in Buswells. We went through it. That type of situation is costing money and slowing jobs by three and four years. It is ferocious. It is one thing I would ask all the Ministers to do something about. It is the bane of our lives now. It impacts when we try to extend an airport or a port. Galway Port was impacted. It impacts when there is an attempt to do a road. No matter what infrastructure is being done, it impacts, even in the case of youngsters. The designated area within 15 km of a place is now basically being called a screening-out area. I saw a place in Clonberne where there was a young couple building a house. There was no designation near them. It was sent out that they needed an EIA, a screening out and all this. We were asking why. The drain near the back of that house was going into the Sinking river, up through Sliabh and heading to Dunmore to another river. It was going up to the River Clare and into the River Corrib, some 40 miles away. That is what frustrates me. I get so frustrated over watching things like that. It cost that young couple a couple of grand more to do all that, at least. That was at the time, but it would be way more now. I will explain the problem. When we were in the bogs, we were on our ground. We were able to stand our battle. Even though people accused us of all types of things, we were able to say that was our ground. A government has to adhere to whatever legislation is in front of it, rightly or wrongly. In my opinion, unless it does that, it is pointless. We can put something to the top of the heap, but to get to the top of the heap, in the midst of EIAs, screenings out, appropriate assessments and all of that, is where I fear there is a major problem. As I said, on principle, I would like clarification on that aspect for private operators. That is the one part I would like the Minister to clarify, if his officials get the chance. I am not putting him on the spot tonight. I would like to know that. For the likes of Irish Water, the ESB and all the semi-States and Government bodies, I think we need to be able to deliver stuff faster. In a lot of cases, the money is there, but we cannot build it. That is sickening altogether. One time ago, we did not have the money, but we would have been able to build it. Now, we have gone vice versa. I ask the Minister if he could do that. I thank him very much.

I have been listening to the debate and it has been astonishing to hear the variety of opinions, concerns and misapprehensions about this Bill. On the one hand, I think it does represent progress. I remember when the Planning and Development (Strategic Infrastructure) Act was passed in 2006 and how that was a step forward in terms of bringing those strategic infrastructure projects into An Bord Pleanála, as it then was, rather than having them always going through local authorities and being delayed that way. In many ways, the 2006 Act was a step forward, but it did not really work, because we have found ourselves in a situation where we are still being delayed with those important strategic applications being made. On the one hand, I recognise the potential progress that comes from this Bill and its necessity in terms of moving these critical infrastructure projects along. On the other hand, I have listened to what people have said about their concerns regarding what the impact of this legislation might be, specifically the modification of the way section 15 of the climate action Act will operate. Some Members have, essentially, catastrophised about the notion that suddenly we will be throwing out the door any concerns about climate action or taking cognisance of the fact that this is an existential threat for us, not just in this country but throughout the world. If I thought that was the case, I must say I would have a real problem with this legislation. I think, however, that two things hold for me. First, and most importantly, European law is still supreme to this legislation. This means the safeguards people are concerned about are still there at a European level, and challenges will still be possible in that context. The second thing is that there was a suggestion that I think is grounded in the notion that we cannot trust the Government to do the right thing. I fundamentally reject that. I know this is a week in which many people in this Chamber are suggesting that, but there is not actually a basis for that view. There is not any evidence to back it up. In my lifetime as an adult, if I can put it that way, the Government has consistently acted responsibly. I know we had a crash 15 years ago and there was irresponsibility that led to that, and that is fine, but in terms of corruption, all the indicators internationally are that this is a country in which we have gone away from corruption. We have moved away from the corruption we saw in the 1990s, which resulted - regressively, I think - in the removal of all these powers from local authority members. That is for another day’s debate. I do not think there is any basis now on which people should be suspicious about the operation of policy by the Government, which is elected by the people. There was talk about a lack of transparency. I note, for example, that section 3(4) requires that any orders made under section 3 would be laid before the Dáil within a reasonable period of time. There is, therefore, transparency there. People will know what orders have been made, what the basis of those orders is for and what the impact of those orders would be. I kind of feel that any of those concerns that have been outlined are assuaged by what is actually in the Bill. I think the safeguards that are there mean we do not need to catastrophise about this legislation. It does not represent some kind of catastrophic or disastrous relinquishment of the important laws in relation to climate change and the safeguards that exist for climate change. I have heard other colleagues complaining about snails, frogs, bats, mosses and all that kind of thing. Those are important things, and we should not downplay the importance of biodiversity and the protection of that biodiversity. When I look at this legislation, I also think about the strategic progress that needs to be made in terms of what we actually deliver for people in this country. At the moment, we have a situation where the types of projects that I anticipate will be covered by this legislation are, on average, taking 63 weeks to get to first-stage approval. This is before any challenges that might arise by way of judicial review or anything else. That is nearly two years. It is an astonishingly long time and an unnecessarily long time. The system at the moment is broken insofar as it is not delivering those projects. The examples that spring to mind when we talk about climate, for example, are renewable energy projects, including wind farms. It takes a long time to get a wind farm up and running and, as we stand here, there is not a single operational offshore wind farm in Ireland. That is a shameful statistic. As we look at solar projects, wind projects, onshore as well, and wave projects we hope will come in the future, we need to be able to action them much more quickly than we are. In an ironic way, they are the very tools that will help us combat the climate crisis, reduce our carbon emissions and replace dirty energy with clean and renewable energy. What this Bill does makes perfect sense to me. We will be supporting legislation that is actually going to implement a change in the manner in which we create this critical infrastructure and make it available to the people of Ireland to help them solve problems into the future. God knows we have enough problems to solve. Many significant infrastructural problems have been allowed to languish over a generation, in essence. We need to take action on them. I think of my own area in Dún Laoghaire. I am forever harping on about water quality. We have a Victorian sewer system that means that when there is a high rainfall event or a lot of water, the run-off goes into the sewer system, down to the back of the West Pier in Dún Laoghaire, and an under-seabed pipe pumps the sewage from the West Pier pumping station to the Poolbeg sewage treatment plant, where it is treated and then discharged into the sea. That is fine, but the pipe only has a given capacity. When there is a lot of rain and the run-off also goes into that sewer system, there is overcapacity at the pumping station. There is an attenuation tank that is 70,000 cu. m. It fills up. That is fine, and it holds the sewage until such time as it can be pumped through to Poolbeg, but when there is a lot of rain it fills up. When it is full, there is nowhere for the material to go but into the sea. We have many videos of this big, black slick coming into Dublin Bay off the back of the West Pier when that attenuation tank is full, and more raw sewage flows into it and there is nowhere for it to go but into the sea, in which we fish for our food and swim for recreation and have water sports. The same water that people swim in and eat from is having raw sewage pumped into it. There is no real justification for that except for the fact we have not taken the infrastructural solutions and implemented them to ensure there is a second attenuation tank at the back of the West Pier. That is a relatively straightforward, simple, implementable solution to that problem. The longer term, much more complex, essentially multigenerational and multibillion euro project is to reform our sewerage and water systems so that we recycle water within homes, use sustainable urban drainage systems and ensure we minimise the use of water in real terms. That is a longer term project but we could build a second attenuation tank next to the West Pier pumping station at the gut at the back of the West Pier in Dún Laoghaire, which would solve that problem in the short term. At the moment not only is that overflowing into the sea but the time lapse in informing people who are swimming in the sea is so slow that they will already have swum in their own discharge - I do not know what the right word to use for that is - and they will not know about it until a day later when the tests come back to show there is bacteria in the water. If that is not something from a different age, I do not know what is, and it is solvable. It is exactly this kind of legislation that will help us solve it in the short term. That is a project that will be caught up in the 63-week delay before we can start construction, and that is provided there is not a challenge. On the subject of challenges, I heard some speakers speaking about how there is an attempt to shut down those using the courts to be activists for better standards and regulation and to stop things happening that should not happen. I agree with them that it is important to allow that to happen. I do not think the answer is to cut out judicial review. The answer is in two forms. The first is to have the judicial reviews but to speed them up. We should use a commercial court-style system, as was used in Ireland in the 1990s to speed up commercial cases. That can also be done for judicial reviews against planning systems. However, that also requires an investment in the Judiciary and more judges to hear those cases so they actually happen more quickly. There are cases where the litigants should be told, “This is the way it's going to happen. Here is your timeline. This is when it's going to be heard and if you're not ready, you're the one who loses out.” That can be done to make judicial review more efficient and thereby not deny people their rights of access to the courts to challenge decisions they have a problem with. As we know because they succeed, they are often right about the challenges they bring. The practical import of the challenges they bring is that they slow down the delivery of infrastructure, and there is no need for that process to restrict or inhibit the production of the critical infrastructure that is named in the Bill. Something else that springs to mind, which I frequently speak about, is the notion of an underground metro system for Dublin. The reality is that we need to start it. Because of massive infrastructure projects that have overrun and become problematic, the obvious one being the children's hospital, to a large extent politicians and the public service in Ireland are afraid of large-scale infrastructure projects. This is because they can prove so problematic and are so complex and, to a large extent, because the expertise is not there in the public service and we rely on external services to deliver them, which does not always work. In terms of building the metro, we do not have to implement a 100-stop metro in the morning or something the size of that in Paris, London or somewhere like that. We can do what they do in Paris, which is to build a short line with a small number of stops. This is the first project. For example, if I think of Paris, the line 14, which was built in the past 25 or 30 years, started off with four stops in central Paris. The project is called Météor. It is a driverless train that is deeper, cleaner and fully wheelchair accessible. They built four stops and it now runs all the way from Saint-Lazare in north-west central Paris to Orly Airport. Initially they built a small line and added on a station at each end and then another station and another station. Instead of having a behemoth of an infrastructural project, they had smaller, bite-size projects that were more manageable. Even if such smaller projects do go pear-shaped for some reason, there is a way in which they do not impact on the delivery of the overall ambition over a period of years. These projects can be done, but in order to do them and deliver 21st-century water treatment facilities for people in Dublin, and in order to deliver 21st-century or even 20th-century public transport systems, we have to approach this with some purpose. The Bill is the first step of that process, to my mind. Notwithstanding the concerns some Members have, and these can all be managed and we can look at the safeguards that are there, this is the way in which we get rid of the delays. We target certain projects and at governmental level we identify them and say a certain project is critical, and that for another one we will make the order under section 3 and make it happen. If we can do that, it is a good thing for people in Dublin and throughout the country. If we can deliver those projects that make their lives better and easier and reduce our carbon emissions and delays, it will create a better infrastructural society for us all. If the Bill can do this and if it is a step down that road, then it is a good thing. On this basis alone, I will welcome the Bill and support it as it goes through.

I agree. We all know where there have been deficits in infrastructure. We know the issues that have existed where people have played the system. That is undoubted. We have also seen situations where we have not seen perfect engagement, be it from the State or developers. We have all seen it in our constituencies. We have seen where pre-consultation and consultation have been done well, where they have removed some of the fears there can be in relation to projects, and then we have seen them progress better. It goes without saying we are talking about areas where we cannot necessarily deliver clean water or a sewerage system that is fit for purpose, and we are talking about this in 2026. Irrespective of the absolutely rightful arguments there were earlier on the fuel crisis and the ineptitude of the Government in dealing with it, at the end of the day there has been abject failure in dealing with our infrastructural deficits and we all need to see this improved 100%. I agree with what many have said, that we are somewhat worried about the fact that pre-legislative scrutiny was waived. I would like to think there will be sufficient time on Committee Stage and that we will not be looking at guillotined legislation from the point of view of working through all of the necessary amendments and arguments that need to be made. Every time the Government has come up with the ultimate legislative solution in relation to infrastructural deficits, it has not changed anything to date. If we look at the Planning and Development Act, planners who spoke to me said it was more sentences, more paragraphs and more words that would be dissected in courtrooms. That was their belief. We need simplicity in this. There is nobody who does not want to see this sort of critical infrastructure being delivered and to reduce and streamline. We constantly talk about streamlining. We know the issues that have existed in the planning system. Obviously, we need to be able to get to grip with the circumstances. We are pretty late in getting into this game, or the Government is anyway. We need to know what exactly is going to fall into the sphere of critical infrastructure. I know people have asked about anaerobic digestion and renewables. Are we talking about State projects or is there room for manoeuvre in relation to other projects? Again, that is about making sure we do not undermine the piece I spoke about where we need to make sure we can at least have decent consultation with people. I could talk about the rail infrastructure in County Louth and the need for more stations but I would start with Dundalk's Clarke Station. We are all talking about the absolute need for public transport, particularly this week, but we do not have enough parking spaces at that station. We have fewer than we had because they were taken away. We are awaiting some sort of solution on that. Even simple solutions like that are not being delivered. We talk about water. It will be years before we see the CFRAM plan delivered in County Louth. We are talking about five projects. As I have said many times before, I live in the Bay Estate and we have a joint sewerage and rainwater system-----

Go raibh maith agat.

-----and any time it rains heavily we are in danger of flooding.

Go raibh maith agat, a Theachta.

It will be years before this is upgraded.

Go raibh maith agat, a Theachta.

The Chair is putting pressure on me. I was in Scoil Bhríde in Síolach the other day. It is an absolutely fabulous school. It has been okayed for two extra teachers but not okayed in any way, shape or form for the two extra rooms that are needed, and that is before the second sanctioned ASD class.

Go raibh maith agat, a Theachta.

I would probably need about 25 minutes to go through all of this and I would still leave some projects behind.

Fair play to Deputy Ó Murchú. He always gets a lot in during the few minutes. I thank all Members of the House for their contributions to this evening's debate. We look forward to further engagement on the Bill as it progresses to Committee Stage. It is clear from the broader contributions that there is a consensus on the need to really reform how we deliver infrastructure. As I said at the outset, the publication of the Bill achieves one of the many actions in the Accelerating Infrastructure report. Really it is about the cumulative implementation of this, which will drive a much quicker and transformative approach to accelerating infrastructure. I have set out why radical change is necessary. We have a persistent infrastructure deficit, the consequences of which we in this House have to deal with and which are articulated by Members daily. Without radical reform we simply will not close the gap, leaving our people stuck in traffic and with too few homes to house our population, and build the infrastructure to bridge and affirm the wider ambition we have for economic and social infrastructure for the State. The Critical Infrastructure Bill places obligations on the Government. It requires us to take hard decisions about prioritisation and to identify a small number of those projects or programmes that are fundamental to everything else we wish to achieve. Others have said that and Deputy Fitzmaurice mentioned it. Water, energy and transport systems are the foundations that drive overall delivery and economic development, whether it is in housing or other areas. By doing this we send a clear and unambiguous signal to the entire system that the projects and programmes are of strategic importance and in the public interest. It allows public bodies to reallocate the resources necessary to prioritise the consideration of these projects. The net effect of this should be a significant acceleration of these critical projects and programmes. This will in turn enable the acceleration of all other economic and social infrastructure necessary for society to thrive. The Bill is short and carefully targeted legislation. It does not reference specific projects. It will provide the Government with the statutory power to designate projects or programmes as critical infrastructure by order. We have had some questions about whether it is all projects, public and private. It is clear in the definition of a project in the Bill that it is a project the purpose of which is the delivery of infrastructure and that is funded by capital investment by or on behalf of the State or by or on behalf of a public body. I think that clarifies this matter, which was raised by Deputies. Any such order will be laid before Dáil Éireann, and if a resolution annulling the order is passed by Dáil Éireann within the next 21 days on which Dáil Éireann has sat after the order has been laid, it can be annulled accordingly. The Government will consider specific projects or programmes that may be designated as critical infrastructure following my written recommendation. It is important to consider that the process of designating projects can only work if restraint is exercised in the designation. Designating too many projects will not allow the licensing, consenting and planning bodies to effectively prioritise. It is intended that the process of identifying which projects or programmes are designated and subject to accelerated consideration will commence quickly after the Bill has been enacted. Once the Government has designated a project or programme, every public body that is involved in a licence, consent or permission associated with the critical infrastructure will be required to prioritise, avoid delay, reduce timelines, parallel processes and co-operate to fast-track critical infrastructure through their existing processes. It also allows and mandates whole-of-state co-operation and ensures critical projects and programmes receive co-ordinated attention across Departments, regulators and agencies. Establishing a clear legal basis for this prioritisation ensures that it receives the fast and co-ordinated attention across the system. The legislation gives the Minister power to issue a direction to any of the public bodies involved in the process, and this will be used to drive improved timelines and performance and, if necessary, mandate all public bodies to take the necessary steps to accelerate their processes. Deputies will be aware, and it was mentioned by a number of Deputies, that I was granted exemption from pre-legislative scrutiny, but this request was not made lightly. We have set an ambitious timeline for implementation because we want to drive delivery and it is in the overriding public interest that we find the means of accelerating certain critical projects and programmes that are fundamental to our provision of social and economic infrastructure. This is why the waiving of pre-legislative scrutiny is important in that context. I value and welcome a thorough and robust discussion on the legislation at the committee as well. I will engage constructively with all Deputies on that to get this right. It has been argued by some in this House, and there were many mentions here, that the solution to delays is more resourcing or staffing for public bodies. In fact, that is not the issue in many instances. An Coimisiún Pleanála has almost doubled its staffing in the last ten years while staffing in the Environmental Protection Agency is up nearly 50% in five years. Fundamentally, what we need to do is reform, simplify and accelerate much of the bureaucratic practice that has seen the development process for infrastructure double in the past 20 years. There has also been reference to section 15 of the climate Act. The disapplication of it means that public bodies can no longer be challenged on how they have assessed these considerations in their decision-making processes and it removes an avenue for judicial review, nothing more. I take the example of the reaction to the Galway ring road only last week and the concern by certain interest groups that they will not be able to use section 15 to try to use the courts to block a piece of critical infrastructure for the west. There are already many comments from Friends of the Environment wanting to use section 15 to stop a piece of critical infrastructure. I have canvassed in Galway and in the west, as have Deputies across the House. Every second door I knocked on wanted to see that happen. If we want the industrial development to happen in the west and if we want to see housing built in the west, then we cannot have the weaponisation of the climate Act for a piece of critical infrastructure. That is just one example in the context of the wider reform piece, which is why it is important to disapply section 15 in the context of critical infrastructure for the State. The Critical Infrastructure Bill seeks to fast-track the process for designating projects and programmes through the existing processes, but more fundamental reform of our legal and regulatory systems is still necessary. That is what is happening in the context of my Department's regulatory simplification unit. Deputy Fitzmaurice mentioned other areas that require attention, which they do. Some of that has a European context that we are working on in the context of the EU Presidency. There is also the wider simplification agenda where there are unnecessary layers and fragmented processes that have come from Europe. We are doing what we can achieve within our own legislative framework but there is a need for further reform. My wider point is that taking the 30 actions and interventions and reforms cumulatively is what builds momentum in the infrastructure cycle. That is why in other areas we are simplifying and streamlining the regulatory environment and we are currently working with key regulatory bodies and Departments to identify such reforms with a particular focus on consenting, permitting and licensing processes across sectors such as the energy, water and transport sectors. This infrastructure is necessary to support the development of all other social and economic infrastructure right across society. It is expected that reforms introduced as part of this process will not simply benefit critical infrastructure projects but will also serve to simplify regulatory processes for infrastructure more generally. If timelines can be reduced and systems paralleled, all projects will move quicker from conception to final delivery, thereby allowing them to open up and be delivered in a more accelerated way for people across the country. We have taken note of the wider debate this evening and as we look to the coming decade the choices and the reforms we make about infrastructure delivery will determine our economic competitiveness, our climate resilience, housing construction and the quality of life enjoyed by communities across the country. I look forward to working with colleagues as we advance this legislation through the House.