The Government has signed off on a delayed 2025 climate action plan with a commitment to “accelerate actions required to respond to the climate crisis, putting climate solutions at the centre of Ireland’s social and economic development”.
The plan retains critical targets to reduce Ireland’s emissions by 51 per cent by 2030, compared to 2018, and to achieving climate neutrality by 2050, but it contains few additional policies measures to what had been proposed by the last government in draft form.
Following its approval by the Cabinet on Tuesday, it was strongly criticised by environmental groups for failing to address failures to meet legally binding emissions reductions and gaps in carbon budgets that mean Ireland could face multibillion euro costs in 2030.
Darragh O’Brien, the Minister for the Environment, Climate and Energy, said the plan “reaffirms Ireland’s position as a leader when it comes to addressing the challenges posed by climate change and reinforces the Government’s commitment to delivering on ambitious emission reduction targets, especially up to 2030”.
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The plan reasserts the need to end reliance on fossil fuels and commits to analysing the price differential between the price of fossil fuels and that of renewables, including “examining options that may incentivise electrification of heat”.
It highlights the need for greater efforts to cut emissions, given Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warnings that applying existing policy measures would only achieve a 29 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030.
But the document says that successfully implementing some policies and measures in the 2024 plan would achieve a 42 per cent reduction by 2030. The EPA had excluded these in its calculations as it “could not identify a clear and feasible implementation pathway for them”.
Mr O’Brien said “years of ambition and hard work have led us to a point where we are finally starting to see meaningful reductions in emissions in Ireland” – with a 6.8 per cent reduction achieved in 2023.
He said Ireland was making significant progress and initial quarterly emissions data for 2024 was pointing to further falls, but more work had to be done.
Accelerating implementation of actions and strengthening climate governance structures in the 2025 plan and the 2026 version due later this year “will be key if Ireland is to close the emissions gap and stay within the limits of the carbon budgets”.
But Seán McLoughlin, climate policy campaigner for Friends of the Earth, said: “The 2025 climate action plan does not put Ireland on a clear path to meeting climate obligations, despite the Government’s restating of its commitment to meeting legally binding carbon budgets.
“It largely ignores the twin elephants in the room: runaway data centre expansion and escalating reliance on fossil-fuel infrastructure, particularly gas. It does not take the steps necessary to bring Ireland into line with binding climate limits and appears to allow more polluting infrastructure.”
Despite the programme for government’s pledge to develop data centres “in alignment with our decarbonisation objectives”, the plan failed to plot a credible path towards curbing their runaway growth in electricity demand, he said.
“The plan states the upcoming data centre connection policy will decarbonise ‘new demand in line with climate targets’. Yet the energy regulator has contended the Climate Act does not provide it with ‘a sufficient legal basis’ to mandate emissions reductions,” Mr McLoughlin said.
Coordinator of the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition Oisín Coghlan said the plan lacks the scale and urgency to cut emissions in line with Ireland’s legally binding pollution limits.
“Its focus on 2030 is misleading. The first five-year carbon budget period ends in December and there’s no sign of the corrective actions required to cut pollution fast enough to meet it.
“As for 2030 it gives the impression that incremental progress is getting the job done when the EPA says we’re heading towards overshooting the legal limit by almost 50 per cent. Where is the ‘decisive action to radically reduce our reliance on fossil fuels’ promised in the programme for Government? I don’t see it in today’s plan,” he added.
Friends of the Earth campaigns director Jerry MacEvilly said the programme for government included commitments to cut sharply the dependence on costly, polluting fossil fuels, and he said the plan rightly put forward a renewables-led system to reduce electricity emissions radically and protect energy security.
“But renewables roll-out can only be part of the solution. The Government must also produce clear policies and new obligations on state bodies to equitably phase out fossil fuels and associated infrastructure,” he said.
The plan did not put forward a clear trajectory to prevent further reliance on expensive polluting gas, oil and coal, Mr MacEvilly said. “Indeed, the first substantive energy decision of this Government was to greenlight plans for a costly state-owned liquefied natural gas terminal.”
