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

Deputy Conway-Walsh raised the issue of the western rail corridor. I am not sure it is classified as a shovel-ready project. A new railway requires a railway order. Perhaps that is not the case because it is an old railway, but I am not sure it is as simple as saying it is shovel ready. I would say a lot would have to be done before it went to tender, let alone put a shovel in the ground. It is a project that has merit, whether to get people from Tuam to Galway and other places by train or for rail freight, and it is being examined by the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, in the context of the all-island rail review.

Deputy O'Callaghan raised an issue in respect of Law Reform Commission recommendations. I will have to come back to him in writing on that. I do not have the information to hand.

Similarly, Deputy Boyd Barrett raised an individual case - I believe the young man's name was Theo - but it is not really possible for me to comment on any individual case here without knowing the facts or having permission to look into it from the person involved. I will certainly ask my office or that of the Minister of State with responsibility for special education to engage with the Deputy on it.

In respect of data centres and electricity, to clarify and correct something Deputy Murphy said, we have never had brownouts. We have had amber alerts. We have not had a red alert and we have certainly never had a brownout or a blackout. There has been a fair bit of scaremongering in that regard, and for the Deputy to say we have had brownouts is just not correct. There have been amber alerts but not red alerts, and there have been no brownouts or blackouts.

In regard to data centres generally, as I said earlier today, over 100,000 people work in the tech sector in Ireland. They might not work in data centres but their jobs are dependent on data centres, and the companies that require them pay billions of euro in tax in Ireland, which we use to pay for healthcare, housing, education and other things. We have to make sure that is part of the debate. As I said earlier as well, EirGrid has not issued any new connections for data centres since July 2020, nearly three years ago, and new applications are assessed on a case-by-case basis, taking into account the Government's policy statement on data centres.

Deputy Smith linked data centres to social media and I think that is a bit facile, but I do agree we should have an open and honest debate about these things. If we had an open and honest debate about data centres, we would know, for example, that Zoom and Webex, technologies that enable remote working, which is so good for family life, require data centres. We would know, for example, that financial information, making electronic payments, Internet banking and other services we use every day require digitisation. We would know, for example, that increasingly, we are going to need data for medicine because more and more often, scans are done digitally and samples taken go to the path lab and are examined individually-----

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