John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail)

There were some really interesting questions and answers there. We will have a second round for anybody who wants to contribute. I am up first.

Mr. Sweetman's contribution has been useful. We will be visiting Washington in early December, so Mr. Sweetman might inform his members of that. We will be going to Washington as the Joint Committee on Foreign Affairs and Trade. We have a pretty intense programme, as committees generally do on these kinds of trips.

My constituency is Dublin South-West. We have district meetings with representatives of the AWS facility there. We have seen the positive side of data centres and energy. To put in a nutshell, the impact a company such as AWS has had not just locally but nationally, one of its senior management team described how, when asking a group of schoolchildren about where and what the cloud is, they were able to tell them that the cloud is in Tallaght. That is a powerful message and an easy piece of narrative to remember. It makes concrete the reality of the digital world we live in and the central role that a place like Tallaght can play. Something as ephemeral and intangible as the cloud in our minds is located in Tallaght. That is a big deal.

I chair an ad hoc cross-party committee on rare diseases and orphan drugs. Mr. Sweetman may not be in a position to comment on the following but I ask him to take it away with him. This country is , to some degree, the home of pharma. Yet, in terms of the cost of drugs, research and development, and, in particular, clinical trials, we are not at the races. I have often thought that if I were a public affairs lobbyist for these companies, and I am not because I am a TD, I would be saying to those companies that they employ a lot of people and invest in people here and should be pushing for a much more encouraging environment in those spaces. Can Mr. Sweetman speak to that at all?

We should consider having an annual meeting here and, also, a separate, informal meeting between the committee and the chamber and some of its members, if Mr. Sweetman wants to do that. It is a dynamic space. I have not discussed the matter with the committee but I think it is something people would be keen on.