Status of the 2020 Programme for Government Climate Commitments - The Labour Party

 

Failures include:

• Retrofitting 500,000 homes by 2030.
• Scaling up and regulating district heating. 
• Realising Ireland’s potential for offshore renewable energy.
• Making our marine environment a carbon sink.
• Committing to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030. 
• Completing the Celtic Interconnector, to connect Ireland’s and France’s electricity grid.
• Replacing all mechanical electricity meters by 2024.
• Introducing efficiency standards for data centres.
• Ending development of liquid natural gas terminals. 
• Putting an end to importing fracked gas. 
• Phasing out single use plastic. 
• Staffing all local authorities with biodiversity officers.
• Achieving UNESCO Status for more Irish sites. 
• Providing drinking water fountains nationwide. 
• Removing lead pipes from the public supply. 

 

148 substantive commitments were made in the ‘Green New Deal’ section of the 2020 Programme for Government. We assigned a grade to each of these commitments based on their status in 2026.

• 29 commitments have been advanced.
• 29 commitments have been maintained.
• 55 commitments were weakened or delayed.
• 22 commitments have been reversed or abandoned.
• 13 commitments have failed or are failing. 

The top two categories are graded as successes, and the bottom three as failures. Significant delays in the realisation of policy constitute failures particularly in the climate context, where every second counts. 

 

Advanced – This commitment has been implemented and further action on foot of it has been taken.

Maintained – This commitment has been implemented but no further action has been taken on foot of it (i.e., progress in this area has stalled).

Weakened or Delayed – A lesser version of this commitment has been achieved; this commitment has been achieved significantly past its original timeline.

Reversed or Abandoned – The State has renounced or no longer acknowledges this commitment.

Failed or Failing – This commitment remains official government policy but has not been achieved and is highly unlikely to be achieved in a timely manner.

 

For a full breakdown of the 2020 Programme for Government Commitments, click here.

 

Climate Action Plans

There is a backlog of 64 actions from prior Climate Action Plans that have not been completed as of July 2026. The outstanding action to finalise the Wind Energy Guidelines dates back to the 2019 Climate Action Plan. Other actions also seem to persist since 2019, albeit in different formulations – the commitment to examining how and when to phase out fossil fuel heating systems in public buildings was first made in the 2019 Climate Action Plan with a deadline for the end of that year, continuously delayed, and then replaced without further update in the 2023 Climate Action Plan with a commitment to develop a roadmap for phasing out fossil fuel systems in all buildings, which was given a deadline of the end of 2023 and has yet to be completed. Likewise the 2019 commitment to develop a policy framework around district heating was delayed, then no longer reported upon, and now there remain new outstanding related actions. 

The 2026 Climate Action Plan is still awaiting publication in August 2026. In contrast, the 2023 Climate Action Plan was published in December 2022. The most recent Climate Action Plan, from 2025, had the lowest completion rate of its actions reported in the subsequent Progress Reports, at 56%. This is in spite of it also having the fewest number of actions of any Climate Action Plan to date, at 82, compared with 2024’s 125 actions, and 2021’s 340.