Ireland is on track to miss its national and European Union climate commitments, in a failure that will result in a \u201csignificant call on the public purse,\u201d an Oireachtas committee heard on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
In a statement to the Budget Oversight Committee this week, Climate Change Advisory Council (CCAC) chairperson Marie Donnelly warned that the state must eliminate fossil fuel use by the end of the next decade to align with environmental imperatives.<\/p>\n
The scale of the challenge is \u201cenormous,\u201d Donnelly said, describing efforts to date as \u201cdisappointing.\u201d<\/p>\n
The fiscal implications of the current trajectory are stark. Donnelly noted that while Ireland has set a national target to slash emissions by 51% by 2030 compared to 2018 levels, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) projections suggest a reduction of just 23% under a \u201cbest case scenario.\u201d<\/p>\n
Failure to bridge this gap and meet EU-mandated energy targets could expose the Irish taxpayer to costs ranging from \u20ac3 billion to \u20ac26 billion, according to council estimates.<\/p>\n
However, the projections regarding potential fines have previously been rejected by the government.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is back-of-the-envelope stuff,\u201d Climate Minister Darragh O\u2019Brien told Gript in October 2025.<\/p>\n
At the time, the Fianna F\u00e1il Minister said that there is \u201cno formula\u201d or \u201ccalculation\u201d that has been agreed regarding the cost of compliance for countries that miss their 2030 targets.<\/p>\n
\u201cI have certainly put forward my views and government views directly to the EU Commission on that as recently as earlier on in September,\u201d O\u2019Brien said.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no formula or calculation and no agreement around cost of compliance.\u201d<\/p>\n
On that occasion, Gript asked if the government would pay a penalty if the European Commission ordered the state to \u201ccough up\u201d \u20ac20 billion.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t see that happening,\u201d O\u2019Brien said, adding that he was \u201cnot going to deal with hypotheticals.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland is on track to miss its national and European Union climate commitments, in a failure that will…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":303104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[14258,143147,2885,25746,61,60,43],"class_list":{"0":"post-303103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ireland","8":"tag-ben-scallan","9":"tag-ccac","10":"tag-climate-change","11":"tag-darragh-obrien","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=303103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/303103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/303104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=303103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=303103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=303103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}