Campaigners trying to stop what they see as ‘Ireland’s biggest and most urgent environmental threat’ will be speaking in Galway city this Friday, to oppose a gas import terminal being introduced on the Shannon Estuary.
The campaigners, part of a community group called Futureproof Clare, say that the huge gas import terminal would lock Ireland and the EU into using climate-polluting fracked gas from the US for decades to come.
An international coalition of campaign groups is opposing Shannon Liquified Natural Gas on the grounds that it threatens people’s health, the local environment and tourism.
They say it would also drag Ireland and Europe away from renewable energy and leave Ireland facing ever bigger EU fines for missing climate change commitments.
As the High Court prepares to hear a Judicial Review later next week on Shannon LNG’s planning permission, campaigners are hosting awareness-raising events across the region.
The Galway event will be hosted by the Galway Feminist Collective and held at the Galway Arts Centre this Friday, 25 January, at 7.30pm, where campaigners will discuss how Shannon LNG would affect people living in the Western region and its implications for climate change.
Anne Marie Harrington of Futureproof Clare, said: “As well as locking Ireland into fossil fuel dependency for decades, Shannon LNG would threaten 21,000 tourism jobs across the Wild Atlantic Way in Clare and Kerry, endanger the Shannon Estuary’s fragile ecosystem and harm communities in the US where the shale gas would be fracked.
“The Government, the gas industry and the EU are pushing this LNG terminal on the basis that Ireland needs it for ‘energy security’.
“This argument was well and truly debunked in November when a major report by four leading academics found that Ireland does not need any new gas imports.”
The report’s lead author, Prof Barry McMullin of DCU, said: “Based on Ireland’s large natural resource of renewable energy coupled with the use of large-scale energy storage, rapid fossil fuel phase-out is not only technically feasible, but can progressively eliminate the security-of-supply risks associated with all imported fossil fuels, while simultaneously decarbonising at the scale and urgency demanded by … the Paris agreement.”
