Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

First, I would argue that our current policy on data centres is not solely focused on location. We were clearly also calling out data centres bringing additional benefits, such as flexibility of demand and their own generation capacity on site. There were a number of criteria that we used in the previous direction.

On future policy and what we are working on now, one thing we have to take on board is that there is Government policy in this area. Government policy is supportive of data centres so long as they are supporting Ireland’s decarbonisation and growth in telecommunications. We acknowledge and work within that. I refer to our next demand-side strategy and review of connections for large users. I think that will have to be all large users and not just data centres because we cannot discriminate necessarily, but that tends to be who it has been up to now. That is where we will bring in that piece around how we ensure that it is sustainable growth, how we decarbonise economic growth and how we bring in large demand that is already net zero. Thinking about what happens in housing policy at the moment, one cannot build a house unless it meets a certain standard. That is what we are thinking about. The new users that are coming on board are an opportunity.

Connection policy is only one aspect of this. This needs to be reflected more broadly as we develop strategy around carbon ceilings across the entire system so that when a new large user is coming to Ireland, it should not think it will develop one model, go for planning for that model and then discover at the very end of the process that there is a new connection policy. Ideally, when new users are potentially coming to Ireland, the kinds of conversations they are having with the development agencies should be, from the start, about net-zero ambitions and how these new users can support our decarbonisation strategy. We are looking at the connection policy but we also want to encourage the broader system to think about how we deliver that collectively.