Mr. Barry Lowry:

There are some countries in Europe that are looking at developing their own national product. France is most ahead. Sweden is also working in this area. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. The overall business case for examining that would have to be done in the wider sphere. A lot of the companies we are talking about as large language model AI providers are companies that are heavily invested in Ireland, in the context of job creation, the tax they pay and the corporate and social responsibility activities they do. That is not unnecessarily an unhealthy thing. It is about getting the balance and understanding what is in the best interests of the country.

On data sovereignty Ireland, possibly more than any other European country, has restrictions in place, which relate very much to data sovereignty and protecting the data of the people. One of the big initiatives we implemented this year was the State data centre at Backweston, County Kildare. The EU liked what Ireland was doing so much that it co-funded it, which was positive. The idea was that we would be moving into our journey on greater use of the cloud from a strong position, which was that we could do this ourselves. There is a Government cloud but I do not think the Government cloud is right for every solution. That is why we are starting to see experimentation with the Azure cloud, the AWS cloud and so on but where they are used, they are strictly governed.

The data remains in the EU-EEA and it is encrypted at source and in transit. There are very strong rules about the governance of that. The EU has come up with a new definition of sovereignty, which is the state is in control of its data assets. I would say definitely, in all our data sharing and all our use of the cloud, the State is very much in control of its data assets.