Mr. Kieran Donoghue:

I will build on the Secretary General's observations. The Senator makes valid points. Our approach to this is that we must try to match the right locations with the profile of the investor. It is important we take the investors' needs into account. One must consider that an increasing number are in the services sector and they emphasise the importance of locations either in or near cities. That does not prevent us, however, from showcasing other locations. We take a hierarchical approach, from cities and city regions to large towns and rural areas, as appropriate. Manufacturers, for example, do not want to locate in a city or city region. Rather, they want their own dedicated site in a more rural location. We showcase a variety of locations, therefore, to our clients. In Mayo, specifically, we have taken the step of putting an advance office building in Castlebar, and the Government has given us €150 million specifically for a regional property development programme to put some of the enabling infrastructure in place in advance of an investment decision, with a view to raising the overall attractiveness of a variety of locations including rural areas.

On data centres, there are approximately 45 in the country. We look at their development in two phases. They first appeared in the 1990s and the vast majority of them were attracted to the eastern seaboard and the region near Dublin for two reasons. They needed high-capacity, high-speed broadband and they needed access to the high-capacity points in the electricity grid. There was an automatic bias, therefore, towards the eastern seaboard, which was understandable from their perspective to enable their businesses to operate. Following EirGrid's reinforcement and investment in the national grid on a national basis, and following investment in fibre-optic cables, we anticipate a second phase of growth where the data centres will take a more active look at regional locations, potentially including the Senator's region. We have completed a report looking at a variety of locations in a regional context that could potentially accommodate the next phase of data centre development. We now see the data centre industry potentially becoming an instrument or a vehicle for regional development.