Ireland has climate targets and clean energy targets. What it lacks is a plan to end dependence on fossil fuels. This is the perfect moment to develop one, for at least three reasons.
First, the past number of months and years have made it painfully clear that fossil fuels are not just a problem for the climate. Our dependence on fossil fuels has been central both to recent energy insecurity fears, and to the cost-of-living crisis triggered by wars in which oil and gas supply became instruments of geopolitical power. Energy security used to be framed around securing fossil fuel supplies, but there’s increasing recognition that real energy security means reducing dependence on them altogether.
Second, momentum around fossil fuel phase-out is gathering, even if global diplomacy remains frustratingly slow.
Ireland will cohost a big international conference on Transitioning Away from Fossil Fuels next year. At the most recent UN climate summit, Cop30 in Brazil, Ireland supported a call for a roadmap away from fossil fuels, echoed in a recent UN General Assembly resolution supporting the International Court of Justice advisory opinion on climate change, also backed by Ireland.
READ MORE
The final Cop30 agreement failed to even mention fossil fuels explicitly, as powerful fossil fuel-producing countries continue to resist language that directly acknowledges the primary cause of climate change. But there is no obvious reason why Ireland, which exports virtually no fossil fuels, should allow itself to be held back by countries whose politics is tied to fossil fuel extraction.
International commitments and ambitious diplomacy are important, but domestic implementation of a fossil fuel exit strategy is where Ireland can show important leadership.
Third, and critically, the Government is preparing a new national energy strategy. This is the ideal opportunity for an explicit plan for a managed exit from fossil fuels.
Ireland already has a Climate Action Plan that sets out targets for renewable electricity, electric vehicles and retrofits. But clean energy targets alone are not enough.
We have targets for what to build, and high-level commitments to climate neutrality, but still no coherent plan for what to phase out, even though fossil fuels still account for nearly 80 per cent of Ireland’s energy mix. This is the missing link in Ireland’s energy policy.
The absence of such a plan creates several risks.
We can simultaneously expand clean technologies while continuing to lock ourselves into fossil fuel dependence, contrary to climate and energy security objectives. Data centres, for example, may grow with the promise of being powered by renewables in the long term, but in the short term be powered by gas. EV sales may grow, but oil demand may remain stubbornly high if sales of fossil fuelled vehicles do not decline.
The absence of a plan also creates ambiguity that allows fossil fuel infrastructure to continue expanding under the banner of “transition” or “energy security”, increasing the risk of stranded assets and greenwashing.
A fossil fuel phase-out plan would close those loopholes.
What would such a plan actually look like?
First, it would need to foreground a just transition to gain legitimacy. Equity is an important goal in its own right. Ending energy poverty can be a cornerstone of the energy strategy, alongside plans to support workers and communities affected by the transition away from fossil fuels.
Second, it would need to establish clear, quantitative and time-bound trajectories for reducing oil, coal and fossil gas consumption, with transition pathways and intermediate milestones for each sector. “Net-zero by 2050” is a necessary target, but insufficient as a roadmap: climate commitments and energy security both demand a much faster transition.
Importantly, the main barriers here are no longer technological, or even about cost. The real barriers are electricity infrastructure, institutional capacity and mandate, finance, planning systems, market structures, public perception, and lobbying by vested interests.
Third, the plan would need to distinguish between temporary fossil fuel use as a backup measure during the clean energy transition, and the continued dependence on fossil fuels embedded in long-lived infrastructure decisions.
There may well be limited roles for fossil gas during the transition, particularly while storage and flexibility technologies continue to scale in the power sector. But temporary measures have a habit of becoming permanent unless exit pathways are explicitly defined.
That is why the continued expansion of fossil fuel infrastructure through LNG, for example, sits uneasily alongside Ireland’s climate obligations. A credible phase-out plan would also force a long-overdue conversation about the future of Ireland’s gas network.
Recent interventions from the Irish Academy of Engineering have presented the continued use of fossil fuels beyond 2050 as an engineering inevitability, rather than a judgment about policy ambition, infrastructure choices and institutional willingness to change. Some of the academy’s proposed solutions – returning to coal, expanding LNG infrastructure and renewed oil and gas exploration – would deepen rather than reduce fossil fuel dependence. (Several members of the academy have publicly distanced themselves from these recommendations).
In some cases, fossil fuel use may be genuinely remain difficult to fully eliminate. But acknowledging niche uses is very different from assuming broad and indefinite dependence.
Energy security itself is being reframed: fossil fuel dependence is becoming recognised not as the solution, but as the primary source insecurity.
Now, while the pain of the energy crisis is fresh in the public’s minds, and while Ireland is set to take the stage internationally, is the ideal time to place that reality at the centre of national policy.
Hannah Daly is professor of sustainable energy at University College Cork
