Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I believe my Department has green procurement policies. I am not 100% sure, but I am not 100% sure for a very good reason, that is, the fact that I have no role in procurement. That is a matter for the Secretary General. I have no role whatsoever in awarding any contracts to any companies on behalf of my Department.

I was asked about vehicles. The Department does not have any vehicles, or at least none that I am aware of. An EV charger has been in place in Government Buildings for quite some time. We have two covered bike racks. It took ages to get it done but they are now done and are very nice. In my previous Department, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and very much led by my Secretary General at the time, Dr. Orlaigh Quinn, we put bees on the roof to produce our own honey and have plans to put solar on the roof as well. I would like us to do the same in Government Buildings. It is a big roof space. I have been up there. There is an old helipad from the past that is no longer used that would be great for solar, bees and pollinators. This is something I am working on but, again, it needs the approval of my Secretary General and the OPW for that to be done. The other thing I would like to do is at least experiment with rewilding or allowing a wildflower meadow to develop on the green area outside Government Buildings, as has been done outside Trinity College. It is not going to change the world or the environment or make a huge difference in terms of biodiversity or emissions, but it would be a good statement, so greening our building is something I am working on. It is very much up to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission to make decisions regarding the Oireachtas but I do appoint members to it and I will certainly discuss it with the members I have appointed to it.

I do not think Deputy Boyd Barrett is wrong about public-private partnerships. Sometimes they can take a long time. Grangegorman is one example. Direct contracts can also take a long time. The national children's hospital might be an example of that, but in the round as opposed to the minority, I do think it takes the State longer to do things than the private sector and it does generally cost more - often for good reasons because the staff are paid more and have better pensions and a transparent procurement process must be gone through when it involves anything to do with public money and the State. There has been a study, which I have not read in a long time so I would have to go back to it, that compared how long it takes Dublin City Council, for example, to build social housing and the cost relative to the private sector doing it. I think that showed there was a premium to be paid if it was done by a public body rather than privately.

It is a good thing that people who were not aware are now aware that data centres have enormous generating capacity of their own. They are power stations as well as being data storage facilities. A very false narrative was put across last year that data centres were going to suck electricity out of the grid and leave us all facing power cuts. We on this side of the House at least always knew and understood that data centres have their own generating capacity, and if it was the case that we ever ran into energy security issues or faced brownouts or blackouts, we would have been asking the data centres to help us and not the other way round.

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