Mr. Eamonn Confrey:

That EirGrid analysis is being fed in to Departments, including our Department and the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation. The answer, from our perspective, is not that we are going to allow all these to be developed willy-nilly because that would be irresponsible in terms of policy-making.

We have to be cognisant of its impact on electricity demand and on security of supply. The difficulty we have is that many data centres wish to connect in the greater Dublin region and there is already tight supply in Dublin. We want to move to a plan-led approach involving more balanced regional development, rather than a developer-driven approach. The Government is trying to respond effectively to that. The benefit of taking some of the demand out of the Dublin region would be that it could be moved to other regional locations and, ideally, to areas that already have a grid footprint and fibre connectivity.