On September 23 last year, then Taoiseach Leo Varadkar travelled to New York for a UN climate change summit. There, he told delegates – and the hydrocarbon extraction industry listening back home – that new oil drilling had come to an end in Ireland. He said: “In the last week, on foot of a request from me, our independent Climate Change Advisory Council recommended that exploration for oil should end, as it is incompatible with a low-carbon future. They recommended that exploration for natural gas should continue for now, as a transition fuel that we will need for decades to…

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