Mr. Feargal O'Rourke:

There was a lot there and I will try to get to it. The question about my new and old roles made me smile. I am a bit like a Deputy who has moved parties. I mean one will still have friends in one's old party but one has moved. In the same way, I have retired now and there is nothing as ex as an ex-managing partner as well. I wish my old firm well but they have moved on and I have moved on and that is that.

I will next discus the interesting question on data centres. We have about 80 data centres at the moment. First, I will put forward the proposition that data centres are a good thing. Why are they a good thing? At the end of the day they are a critical part of our digital infrastructure and anchoring the technological operations that are here. They play a part in our everyday lives whether it is video-conference calls, health records or whatever. Data centres are a good thing. The problem we have at the moment is a supply of renewable energy to power the incremental data centres we have got on.

Earlier I mentioned a talk that Mr. Brendan Tuohy gave as chair of EirGrid in UCC earlier this month.

He talked about supply of up to 10 GW by 2030, of which 80% would be renewable. At the moment, we are between 6 GW and 7 GW. For making the jump from here to there, he postulated 1.6 GW might be from heavy energy users, another 1 GW might be electric vehicles and the rest might be natural growth of 4% to 5% in the economy in the coming years. This goes to a question the Deputy asked earlier. If we can get to 2030 with a supply of 10 GW, 80% of which is renewable, we will have bridged the next six years exceptionally well. Of the strategic challenges facing the country, the ones in our control are delivering on renewable energy, water, the grid system and housing in the next six years. If we can deliver on the plans we have in place for those, we will manage that transition. I have a slight concern that period could be a littlle bumpy if demand gets ahead of the supply of renewable energy. Data centres are good and we should accommodate them as much as we can. If we get to our planned supply of energy and renewable energy by 2030, we will be fine. It may be bumpy along the way as we try to get more data centres in and are not far enough advanced at the time. The Government is producing an industrial policy on renewable generation, wind in particular, which is due out in the next couple of months from the Department. That will hopefully lay out the roadmap for the next five or six years.

I have mentioned the delivery challenges within our control - renewables, water, the grid and housing. On the geopolitical ones, in a way near-shoring and friend-shoring are playing to us. One thing Covid taught many companies was their supply chains were too stretched. Something like Covid, or war in Ukraine or the Middle East, is a dislocative event to supply chains and causes angst in the system. As a result, Ireland looks more attractive because it is stable, predictable and far removed from centres of ongoing war and the humanitarian disasters that accompany them. We are a friendly neutral nation that is pro-business and pro-inward investment. People ask if I worry about getting into a more protectionist era, but if we get into a protectionist era with a fortress US and a fortress Europe, global companies will have to have a foot in both camps and operations in both camps, which will help us. While the geopolitical landscape is in flux, we are well positioned to take care of that.

The Deputy mentioned tax. We have seen in the past three or four years a massive increase in corporate tax receipts, fuelled predominantly by foreign direct investment companies. That is not a surprise for those who have worked in tax because the whole OECD proposal since 2014 was designed to say you cannot have profits in far-off locations where you have no activity and that you have to align your activity and your profits. We have successfully done that with our multinationals in recent years and generated tax benefits from it. There will be a slight retreat from the current numbers. In simple terms, 100 years ago the big countries decided the tax rules would work as follows: you will pay tax where you have a physical location; if you do not have a physical location, you will not pay any tax. Mail-order businesses never paid tax in the countries they sold into but it was hard to penetrate a market if you did not have people on the ground. The world has moved on and the big countries are saying they need to change the tax rules. They are looking to change them to say that if you sell into a country, even if you do not have a physical presence there, you will pay some tax there. That will see us giving away some of the tax we collect from companies whose centre for operations is here and, therefore, whose tax is paid here. Some of that tax will have to go to the countries into which they sell. We signed up to that a couple of years back but the US have not signed up to it yet - and they are the ones who are the biggest proponents of this. I still think we are in a great place.

This came home to me a few years back during the OSCE discussions when I was having a discussion with a global head of tax of one of the biggest companies in the world. I said to him that he had never asked me whether the 12.5% rate would move or not, and his answer was that whatever way the landscape played out, Ireland would be at the competitive end of it so he was not worried. That is where we need to be. We need a fair tax system recognised globally and by the OSCE as fair. We need a competitive tax system. We are nimble and can change legislation when needed to get a better result for Ireland and for inward investment. It is probably the optimist in me. The things under our control I think we can manage over the next five or six years. The geopolitical thing I think we can manage. To answer the Deputy's last question, it is about making sure, with the challenge of sustainability, decarbonisation, artificial intelligence and digitisation, we are right on the shoulder of our clients helping them with that. Strategic leadership is a key part of that and making sure Irish local management understand what their companies' global roadmap is, where it is going and how we use our influence to make sure Ireland is on the next iteration of that global roadmap. That is the challenge.

We have already set up a programme in IDA. It is relatively small at the moment but we run an academy for business leaders in multinationals to help them meet their peers. It can be a lonely job sometimes to run a multinational. You do not really have a peer network. We are trying to help them create that network to learn best practices and give them the tools to influence the global roadmap back at headquarters. We are on it. It is a challenging environment for the next few years but one the IDA is capable of succeeding in.