Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister of State for the very clear and precise answer that actually addressed the issue I raised. We often get a page and a half of irrelevance and five lines of relevance. In this case, however, the issue was addressed head on.

My concern is that in the long term, the CRU will take it upon itself to ignore the wider picture. I agree that every new data centre should have a road to sustainability. I fully accept that but this might not be possible in the short term. This is where the dilemma arises for us as a nation. In the longer term we know that we probably have more energy off our coast than we will ever need and we will be exporting it to other economies. Are we going to export the jobs and the digital economy with it or are we going to take a balanced view of how we go forward? Provided there are clear paths to sustainability within a reasonable timeframe and we use the extraordinary resources off our coast, industry will be able to progress in the coming five or six years until we get to that crossover point where we are not only self-sustainable but able to export our electricity.

The challenge for us is how to manage this. In the context of modern regulation, it worries me that regulators have a habit, as we see with the CRU in relation to water connections for domestic houses, of working in a framework that is independent of the reality or the common good on the ground. We have to be careful in this case that we do not kill the goose that is laying the golden egg. Instead, we should do as the Minister of State has outlined, which is to have a clearly managed process going forward to get to that sustainability without missing a step in the development of the digital economy, including data centres.

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