Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First, I congratulate the Minister of State, Deputy Calleary, on his appointment, which is a great appointment. He has served in that Department before, so he will hit the ground running. I wish him every success.

I welcome this Bill. However, I would like to add some context. The record of foreign direct investment, FDI, in Ireland has been exemplary. That is something we should also stress in bringing in this sort of regulation. The professionalism of the Industrial Development Authority, IDA, is second to none. The quality of investment it has brought in is outstandingly high. I fear that some people in this House understate the contribution that FDI has made to the success of our economy and never miss the opportunity to attack our FDI sector, blaming it for an electricity shortage because of its investment in data centres or laying blame on it for alleged unfair work practices in other countries that are not directly linked to FDI in many cases. We need to value what has been achieved by the FDI sector.

Even since 2011, when I had the privilege to be appointed Minister, which was just ten years ago, there has been an 88% increase in employment in IDA companies. That is 130,000 extra people employed in those companies and an undisputed multiplier of more than one for one. This means there are 130,000 other jobs in the economy as a result of that. Their wage levels are €57,000 - exceptionally high - on average, which is much higher than the average wages in other sectors. They have also been very instrumental in modernising the approaches in our economy, in lifting the levels of training, management experience and start-ups and have created an environment that has been absolutely invaluable to the success of the Irish economic model. We should not lose sight of that.

Of course, it is necessary that we recognise that in a world where data is becoming the new source of wealth and the control of data is often hard to track, we need to be much more conscious of regulatory controls and the fear that it gets into wrong hands. The control for political purposes of strategic infrastructure is not an idle fear. We have seen it time and again, not only in aggressive and often criminal cyberattacks, but also through investment channels, which deserve scrutiny. Therefore, the intention of this Bill is welcome. I see it as copperfastening our confidence in the quality of our FDI infrastructure, rather than in any way casting some doubt on the quality of the work of the IDA or the type of investment that it has cultivated.

Looking at the experience in other countries where this type of instrument is in place, it shows that only 1% of transactions that have come under scrutiny have been blocked. Therefore, this is not a widespread practice. However, it is one that we need to move on early to prevent it taking hold by those who would seek to undermine the infrastructures that support democratic societies such as our own.

It deserves more thinking among the political class, and those who seek to regulate new industry, about the models we have developed and how they contrast with some other countries where there is complete political control of media, information flows and data among citizens. We need to value the type of environment that we have here, but not pretend that is devoid of threat. The significant flows of data and the lack of regulatory oversight in many cases of companies that control these and the rules and principles that they apply is something the regulators the world over in open democratic societies, such as our own, have to take more seriously. We do not want to see what I heard one political commentator describe as “political entrepreneurs” exploiting the nature of data management in democratic countries such as our own. Therefore, it is right that we are considering not only the investment by entities that might seek to distort the infrastructures that we depend on, but also think more strategically ourselves about those.

I have one last comment. Everyday in this House, I hear blame being applied to companies that seek to have data centres. Of 275,000 employees in IDA companies, 158,000 of those are in either ICT or business services. They depend on data centres to be the infrastructure that underpins them. Let us be blunt. The EU has consciously created an emissions trading system that promotes the location of those data centres in the countries where they are most efficient, and that is Ireland. We should not be pointing the finger at data centres for the failure of our energy system to meet the demand, which is an increased demand of 8% in five years.

In the case of commitments made to deliver additional power to our infrastructure, the failure is by the entities which contracted to deliver in auctions. It is all too easy for people to point fingers at others who invest in good faith in critical infrastructures that the EU recognises are efficiently delivered in Ireland and which do not fall onto the Irish inventory of carbon emissions. Our obligations do not relate to data centres because they are in the emissions trading system. We need a little more honesty in some of these debates about the role, importance and needs of multinational companies in Ireland.

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