ENVIRONMENTAL groups have vowed they will fight any decision to allow the Shannon Estuary to be a site for an LNG fracked gas import terminal.
A coalition of environmental groups in the region claims the project would be “both a climate disaster and a betrayal of the people who helped to ban fracking in Ireland”.
The Stop Shannon LNG Coalition says a proposed terminal – reported across this past week week – is to feed energy-hungry data centres and would make Ireland less energy secure by locking the country into US fracked gas for decades.
The groups are part of a grassroots movement which relies on “scientific evidence, years of campaigning, and first-hand accounts from victims of the fracking industry”.
Dr Sinead Sheehan, a campaigner with the Stop Shannon LNG coalition, said that “fracking is a public health concern, this is the reason we banned fracking in Ireland, because it is known to cause cancer through poisoning the water and the land”.
“If we support the importation of fracked gas, we lose the moral ground to maintain a ban on fracking in Ireland,” she added.
Dr Sheehan continued that it was “nonsense” that an LNG facility would only be used in emergencies, as stated by Minister for Energy and the Environment, Darragh O’Brien, on national radio.
Minister of State at the Department of Justice, Limerick TD Niall Collins, welcomed the Government’s decision last week to develop a State-led liquified natural gas (LNG) terminal.
The government approved a memo from Minister O’Brien on the LNG terminal.
Minister Collins said: “Recent world events have shown that we are now living in a completely changed international context.”
“We are a small island on the edge of Europe that is reliant on imports to meet our energy requirements, as seen by the effects of the energy crisis following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We need to stand on our own two feet as a nation in terms of our energy supply.
“This terminal will provide a temporary gas reserve that will be critical to our energy security, particularly helping us to guard against any interruption to gas supplied by subsea interconnections.”
Minister Collins also suggested the Shannon Estuary as a location for the terminal, saying: “In an encouraging development, last year the High Court reversed a ruling by An Bord Pleánala to refuse permission for the construction of an LNG terminal on the Shannon Estuary. The proposed site on the Tarbert-Ballylongford landbank would bring benefits to the local community as well as the wider Mid West region.”
