Irish Centre for Human Rights Blog

By Dr. Maeve O’Rourke

During St Patrick’s Day ceremonies in Washington DC last week, President Donald Trump brought up the Irish Government’s plan to import fracked gas for a ‘strategic gas emergency reserve’, saying: ‘I’m hopeful that we’ll soon reach a deal to sell American liquefied natural gas – and that’ll bring down your deficit a lot – so I think you have to make this deal with us, you better do something.’

This post briefly considers the serious human rights implications of this potential ‘deal’ with the US energy industry. It reflects on research that our Human Rights Law Clinic postgraduate students have carried out with the input of community groups ‘Safety Before LNG’ and ‘Love Leitrim’ who are part of the current Stop Shannon LNG campaign. Finally it discusses the recent pre-legislative scrutiny recommendations of the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy in response to the Government’s General Scheme of the Strategic Gas Emergency Reserve Bill 2025.

Ireland’s climate-related obligations

The national Climate Change Advisory Council warns that ‘Ireland remains substantially off track in meeting its EU and national emissions reduction targets’. This is despite the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Act 2021 creating legally binding carbon budgets and greenhouse gas emissions reduction targets (of a 51% reduction by 2030 compared to 2018, and climate neutrality by 2050).

In addition to being required under Irish and European law to reduce national greenhouse gas emissions dramatically, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) has clarified that the Irish State is also obliged under customary international law not to contribute to transboundary environmental harm. In its July 2025 Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, the ICJ found unanimously that:

States have a duty to prevent significant harm to the environment by acting with due diligence and to use all means at their disposal to prevent activities carried out within their jurisdiction or control from causing significant harm to the climate system and other parts of the environment, in accordance with their common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities. (my emphasis)

Considering the national and extraterritorial environmental and public health consequences of the fracked gas supply chain, it is gravely concerning that the Irish Government recently overturned its established policy against importing fracked gas and now plans to import this extremely harmful fossil fuel. 

During her official country visit to Ireland in February 2026, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, Astrid Puentes Riaňo, observed that the Government’s plan is ‘yet to include adequate, comprehensive and scientifically based assessments of environmental and climate impacts’.

An ‘emergency reserve’ of fracked gas from the US

In January 2026 the Government published its General Scheme of the Strategic Gas Emergency Reserve Bill 2025. This draft legislation is intended to provide for a Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU), which is described as ‘a large vessel with the ability to store, transport, and regasify Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) and distribute this natural gas to the national gas network’. 

The Government contends that the LNG supply will be used only in case of emergency. Yet, it acknowledgesthat due to ‘boil-off’, the ‘emergency reserve’ will be re-filled six times per year and ‘[a] minimum send out of gas from the FSRU to the national gas network will ensure gas is not lost in this manner.’

The Government and Gas Networks Ireland have identified the community of Kildysart, Co Clare, as the location for the planned FSRU. This location, in the West of Ireland, and President Trump’s explicit remarks on 18 March indicate that the LNG imported into Ireland will be fracked gas from the United States. 

Since the lifting of its federal LNG export ban in 2016, the United States has become the world’s largest exporter of LNG which comes mostly from fracked gas. At the same time, several US states have banned fracking—as have Ireland and numerous other European countries while contributing to the demand for its continuation in other jurisdictions.

Human Rights impacts 

The latest ‘Compendium’ of scientific findings concerning fracking issued by Concerned Health Professionals of New York and Physicians for Social Responsibility, based on 2,303 published peer-reviewed studies, should stop the Irish Government in its tracks. 

Just some of what happens when gas is obtained through fracking and prepared for transport from the United States, and is then used elsewhere, is summarised as follows:

• ‘North American fracking operations for both oil and gas are driving the current surge in global levels of methane, a greenhouse gas 86 times more potent at trapping heat than carbon dioxide over a twenty-year period and which has contributed approximately 40 percent of all global warming to date’ (Compendium, p10);
• Bearing in mind the toxic air pollution, water contamination, earthquakes and other public health impacts it causes: ‘Fracking is an environmental injustice, with injuries not borne equally by all. Throughout the United States, pregnant women, children, Indigenous people, communities of color, and low-income communities are disproportionately harmed by fracking’ (Compendium, pp9-10); and
• ‘The liquefication and transportation of natural gas as LNG raises its greenhouse gas emissions even further, by another 30 percent, both because of the need for evaporative cooling and venting but also because flaring is used to control pressure during regasification.’ (Compendium, p53)

The Compendium’s authors conclude: ‘The only method of mitigating its grave threats to public health and the climate is a complete and comprehensive ban on fracking. Indeed, a fracking phase-out is a requirement of any meaningful plan to prevent catastrophic climate change.’ (p10)

Indeed, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, Elisa Morgera, has recommended an immediate global ban on fracking, oil sands and gas flaring (as well as offshore exploitation and exploitation, and exploration or exploitation in protected and highly biodiverse areas). This 2025 recommendation built on a 2019 recommendation by the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment, David R Boyd, that all Developed States ‘should demonstrate leadership by…prohibiting the expansion of the most polluting and environmentally destructive types of fossil fuel extraction, including oil and gas produced from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), oil sands, the Arctic or ultra-deepwater.’

Human Rights Law Clinic participation in the Irish campaign against fracking

In 2021, it seemed as if Ireland may become a significant leader in the movement to phase out fracking globally. In May 2021, the Government issued its now-reversed Policy Statement (promised in its 2020 Programme for Government)—which committed to not allowing the development of LNG terminals in Ireland, to working with European States to allow the importation of fracked gas to be restricted, and to working with international partners ‘to promote the phasing out of fracking at an international level within the wider context of the phasing out of fossil fuel extraction.’ The Policy Statement emphasised that Ireland had ‘already banned the use of fracking for the extraction of natural gas onshore and ended the issuing of new exploration licences for oil or natural gas offshore’. It acknowledged that ‘fracked gas can have significantly higher greenhouse gas emissions than conventional natural gas, both nationally and globally, and the widespread use of fracked gas would not be consistent with Ireland’s 2030 and 2050 climate objectives nor globally with the Paris Agreement’.

Our postgraduate students in the Human Rights Law Clinic at the ICHR had the privilege of working with several of the individuals, community groups and organisations that achieved this milestone Policy Statement. Based on research which they disseminated in an episode of the ICHR’s Human Rights Podcast, students created a twitter and email campaign to encourage 2020 General Election candidates to pledge their support for prohibiting the importation of fracked gas. Students also published a detailed legal opinion regarding the compatibility with EU and WTO trade law of legislation to prohibit the importation to Ireland of fracked gas. This legal opinion was the basis for a November 2020 joint submission by ICHR staff and postgraduate students and several organisations to the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate Action, proposing a legislative ban on importing fracked gas by way of amendments to the Petroleum and Other Minerals Development Act 1960 (according to draft legislation written by Gerry Liston of the Global Legal Action Network). 

Resulting from the submission, the Joint Committee on Climate Action recommended in its December 2020 report on pre-legislative scrutiny of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development (Amendment) Bill 2020 ‘that the Minister address in the Bill and/or revert to the Committee with a comprehensive plan to ban the importation of fracked gas and specifically to ban LNG terminals in Ireland within the year 2021’. 

Between 2020 and 2021, students worked to encourage the Irish Government to co-sponsor a proposed UN General Assembly resolution calling for a global ban on fracking. The students worked alongside Friends of the Earth, Safety Before LNG, Belcoo Frack Free, Fridays for Future Ireland, Love Leitrim, FutureProof Clare, and Sister Majella McCarron, convening a national and international civil society coalition in favour of such a move. The effort built on an Open Letter in 2019 to UN Secretary-General António Guterres, sent by affected communities groups across the world to request a global ban on fracking. 

Students also published a lengthy report on the ‘International Human Rights Impacts of Fracking’ which analysed extensive scientific research alongside international human rights law and found ‘it is difficult to see how a State can propose and utilize fracking operations without breaching its international and regional human rights obligations’ given the impacts of the fracking process and industry on (among others) the rights to life; health; water; food; housing; information; public participation; a safe, clean, health and sustainable environment; and freedom from discrimination. 

Oireachtas Committee

Last month, the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Climate, Environment and Energy published its Pre-Legislative Scrutiny Report regarding the Government’s Strategic Gas Emergency Reserve Bill—following an accelerated pre-legislative scrutiny process of four weeks rather than the usual eight. 

The Joint Committee’s Report notes that, in order to achieve its plan for a Floating Storage and Regasification Unit (FSRU), the Government’s Bill will allow all provisions of the Planning and Development Acts to be disapplied, will simply ‘deem’ Maritime Area Consent, and will ‘[p]otentially disapply the ordinary requirements of the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015 by statutorily “deeming compliance” with that legislation’. (pp7, 23)

The role of data centres in creating the situation which, according to the Government’s analysis, now necessitates a €900 million 10-year investment in importing fracked gas from the US for emergency purposes, is highlighted in the Joint Committee’s Report as follows:

Stakeholders identified data centres as the main driver of rising gas and electricity demand, contributing to system stress, N‑1 non‑compliance and the rationale for the proposed strategic gas reserve. They stated the issue stems from unmanaged demand rather than insufficient supply. Officials and expert witnesses likewise noted that data centres are now among the largest sources of industrial gas demand, which they viewed as conflicting with national climate and energy security objectives. They also argued that data centres increase reliance on gas‑fired generation during low‑wind periods, heightening exposure to shocks. They warned that, without safeguards, the LNG terminal could be used commercially, including routine absorption of boil‑off gas. They cautioned that households may ultimately subsidise risks created by large data centres, increasing costs and energy‑poverty pressures. (p12)

Relatedly, in February 2026, the UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment requested and was refused permission by Microsoft to visit their data centre facilities in Dublin. This is a serious matter, given the formal invited nature of the Special Rapporteur’s visit to Ireland and the Revised Terms of Reference for country visits by Special Procedures mandate holders of the United Nations Human Rights Council which list freedom of movement and freedom of inquiry as the primary essential requirements of such visits.

The Joint Committee’s Report also discusses deficits in state support for renewable energy proliferation:  

Members stated that the degree of urgency underpinning this bill is not matched by other measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuels or to facilitate private or state-led construction of renewables such as offshore wind capacity. Officials stated that incentives to support the development of solar energy have been markedly successful. No equivalent emergency measures have been proposed for the development of renewable energy sources or energy storage. (p18)

Regarding the next phase of the Government’s legislative proposal, the Oireachtas Joint Committee’s recommendations include that: 

• The Bill must provide for implementation, rather than disapplication of or deeming of compliance with, the Planning Acts, the Climate Action and Low Carbon Development Act 2015, and Maritime Area Consent.
• The Bill should provide for ‘timely, transparent and thorough engagement with communities adjacent to the FRSU site’, and a ‘comprehensive human health-focussed assessment of the FRSU on adjacent communities should be conducted including the opportunity to make observations’. (p24)
• The Government should carry out ‘an immediate and updated Energy Security Review that would include examining current geo-political scenarios, deployment of further wind energy and battery storage capacity, Ireland’s commitment under the EU’s Energy Efficiency Directive, use of secondary fuels, fast tracking the LirIC and Mares interconnectors and limiting the growth of big energy users such as data centres, and this should inform the final Bill.’ (pp27-28)
• ‘[E]very effort should be made to avoid the importation and use of fracked gas within the proposed facility.’ (p29)

Conclusion

Ireland’s is campaigning for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council from 2027 to 2029. We are also due to undergo our Universal Periodic Review at the UN Human Rights Council in November 2026 (with a deadline of 10 April for stakeholder submissions). These processes offer opportunities to encourage the Irish Government, again, to pursue a global phase-out of fracking rather than contributing to the demand for this egregiously harmful fossil fuel, which is increasingly a bargaining tool for President Trump. 

Learn more about the ICHR’s Human Rights Clinic here.