Ossian Smyth (Dún Laoghaire, Green Party)
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I thank the Senator. It is good to talk about this. The economy has changed massively since 2009. In that year, we did not have €20 billion or €25 billion of income coming in from multinationals, their data centres and so on. At that time, large energy users were not data centres. Now, large energy use has become a synonym for data centres. In 2009, of the 65 top large energy users, approximately one third were Irish and two thirds were multinational. Of those 65 large energy users, 21 were in the pharmaceutical sector, 11 in ICT, eight in cement, mining and refining, and so on. Universities were also among those large energy users. It was a very different landscape from what we have now.