Mr. Oisín Coghlan:

I will comment on data centres. There is definitely a need for overarching planning because the latest figures from the CSO show that 22% of our electricity last year was for data centres and, right now, half of all the electricity in Dublin and the surrounds, I think it is Dublin and Meath, is used for data centres, which is mind-boggling. I almost doubt that when I say it, but that is the case. We are a complete outlier by comparison. Virginia has a high percentage, but the European average is less than 3% of electricity.

In 15 years, when we have this vast resource of offshore wind developed, maybe we will be able to sustain that level of data centres but, right now, it is a real threat to other policy goals, not only, as the committee would expect us to say, climate policy goals but also housing goals. As the committee may have heard, the Secretary General of the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment recently said that there is a direct conflict between connections for new housing developments and connections for data centres. There was some pushback on that, but that was her analysis of the situation. Other State agencies had alerted to that issue as well. The Government seems to be not wanting to give any negative signals to big tech right now but, obviously, from what we hear, housing is its primary policy goal. It will have to find a way to manage that transition and prioritise, we would say, the social good of housing and the environmental and social good of constraining our emissions, at least while we build the renewable energy infrastructure. If we are already heading to 30% of electricity for data centres anyway by 2030, we are doing more than our fair share of housing the cloud and we need to make sure we have overarching planning that achieves the other policy goals that we say we want.