Ms Aoife MacEvilly:

I wanted to speak about the context of that 2021 decision. I refer to the timeline from the point that EirGrid wrote to us to say that there was an issue we needed to urgently address to the point that we consulted on and produced that direction to it. It was actually quite short; I think in that case it was actually a matter of months. In addition, in the timeline the Deputy described, we were not just looking at connection policy but also introduced an entirely new market, which was known as the integrated single electricity market, I-SEM, project and which was a redesign of our wholesale market, including capacity auctions. As we were running annual capacity auctions to bring in new capacity, a whole range of measures were being progressed simultaneously. It was not just the case that there was a single action regarding the data centres connection policy. I just wanted to add that point.