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

I take the Chair's point, and I will move on.

I accept Ms Donnelly's framing and that what she is saying is a problem is also a problem. I do not accept that it is the only problem. Does Ms Donnelly not see that even if we can bring the renewables into stream and on time in order to accommodate this further growth of data centres, there still is a problem. There are two problems. One is the "escalator going up" problem. We are expanding energy usage. For every kilowatt of energy that we spend on running data centres, that is not going to something else that is, in my opinion, more socially useful. One has corporate power purchase agreements, CPPAs, and renewable power all going to data centres but we have just had the development then of renewable power that is not going to transition other energy from fossil fuels to renewable power. That is one problem. This is a delay. The more we expand energy usage, the slower we will be to get to a point of carbon neutrality. Does Ms Donnelly not accept that this is a fundamental problem with expanding energy usage?