Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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I will move on because I am conscious that others wish to come in. The CRU representatives will look into it and examine whether that is a potential.

There was a paper out this week by a couple of the economists from the Economic and Social Research Institute, ESRI, about data centres and how the biggest issue is not just the location of the data centres but their magnitude and their demand that they are putting on energy policies. Since this term, I and others have been talking about the impact and potential future impact of data centres, how we are going to manage it and how there needs to be control and regulation of them. The response from the CRU was to focus essentially on the location of the data centres, and that was from a grid perspective but not a pricing perspective. Is that a missed opportunity to bring those large data users and that large demand under control? I note that in the CRU’s statement, it states that large-scale consumers and the restrictions and framework for that are far less formed. It is within the CRU’s remit to deal with the connections policy. It could have controlled the data centres to a much higher degree than it did. Can the CRU representatives see now that perhaps we should have acted a couple of years ago or even before that because it has been an issue for many years? Do they see that it was a missed opportunity not to control data centres even further when the CRU brought in that direction?