Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, RISE) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for the presentations. I will start with Ms Donnelly. As I understand it, the role of the Climate Change Advisory Council is to advise the Government on, among other things, how we can transition to a carbon neutral economy. It is not bound by the energy policy of the Government or anything else, so it is free to advise what is necessary. Ms Donnelly listed the significant problems with data centres and our being wildly off target in terms of electricity usage, the usage of data centres and so on. I was then surprised, to be honest, that all of her recommendations effectively assume the continuation in growth of the data centre sector in Ireland and ways we can limit that negative influence, as opposed to proposing the obvious, straightforward and, I would argue, more effective route of saying there must be no more data centres. Will she outline why she has taken that approach?