John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thought Deputy McNamara's was among a number of really thoughtful contributions this morning. Sitting in the Chair is always a good place to be to listen to the debate.

It is a necessary discussion but I am disappointed. That is why I liked the contributions of Deputies Bacik, McNamara and others. I found some of the other contributions incredibly one-sided - this rush to be on the side of the virtuous here. Yet someone is eating, to use the terms we use about data, or consuming a great deal of data. It is a generational issue. Your Spotify, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and TiKTok are all data. I am not loading this on a particular generation but if those data were not being used, there would not be a reason to store them. Equally, the provision of data centres has saved multiple indigenous Irish companies, including semi-State companies and, I imagine, commercial companies, a huge amount of money in terms of research and development because these companies now manage their data. They themselves do not have to manage their data. They give it to these companies to manage, thereby saving institutions in this country hundreds upon hundreds of millions of euro. Imagine if each financial institution, technological institution or tech company had to manage its own data and continually upgrade its systems to ensure those data were secure. Instead, you have a corporate provider - we may not agree with it - who does all that and guarantees it and takes responsibility for it. That is data. If we are to have a cycle and want it to be a virtuous cycle, the target cannot always be those who manage the data, store them and secure them, including memories such as photographic memories. All those photographs we take every day on our iPhones, all those selfies around Leinster House and all those videos we publish on social media are up in the cloud.

I know a bit about the cloud because part of it is in Tallaght. Deputy Paul Murphy also made a considered contribution, and he talked about the Amazon Web Services, AWS, site in Tallaght. The Deputy correctly mentioned the old Jacob's factory - the Irish Biscuits factory - which was a great employer in Tallaght. It closed, and that site lay dormant for many years despite different attempts to get companies to move into it. AWS moved in. What the Deputy forgot to mention was, and this is what we need to bear in mind too, it is not only the investment. There are hundreds of people employed in the construction of that site, in securing the site and in landscaping the site. Then there is the commercial rate the local authority gets. When I was a councillor on South Dublin County Council, there were approximately 15 companies that paid 85% of the commercial rates, and if you were to remove any of them from South Dublin County Council, it would impact the services provided to each and every citizen of the county. I am not being an advocate, because I recognise we need to have a conversation, but let us not say we are the bad guys and they are the good guys because they all use data and I use data.

Then I thought of the funniest ones of all. I am sure there must be a significant carbon footprint in that data centre that is housing all Sinn Féin's electoral data, although it is not in Ireland.

It is in Germany so at least our electricity grid is being spared that burden. The whole talk today is that data centres are bad and everybody who is against them is good. Data are essentially with us. They are like the air we breathe. The amount of data has grown and it is time for a conversation, but that conversation should not be framed around pitching those who favour and see the value of the enterprise side of it, and all the good and positive things data centres bring, against those who do not.

I want to talk about AWS because it is the only instance I know of in my constituency. Many of the contributions here said there is very little economic, labour and employment benefit. Obviously, we all know about the corporation tax that is paid. That is the headline figure but there is also the commercial rate. Commercial rates are the lifeblood of every county in this country. Councils could not move, exist, function and do all the things they do, from libraries to roads to environmental issues to parks, without the significant contribution, and rightly so, the commercial rates bring them.

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