Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

We are heading for climate catastrophe. We know that 2024 was the warmest year on record - 1.6 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Already, extreme weather events, hunger and sickness related to climate change are responsible for the loss of 300,000 lives a year. That figure, unfortunately, will only rise.

We now have a climate denier in the White House. He says, "drill, baby, drill", but here we have a government supported by climate deniers which is saying, "Burn, baby, burn", to big tech and its data centres.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael have turned this country into a dumping ground for big tech. They are currently using more than 20% of our electricity, more than ten times the European average. They will be using one third of our electricity by the end of this decade. Over the past five years, all of the additional wind energy produced in Ireland has been more than outstripped by data centre growth. The programme for Government gives the green light for even more of these data centres.

Now we have a proposed decision from the CRU which is explicit in saying that they do not even have to use renewable energy. CRU commissioner Dr. Harrington repeatedly, on "Morning Ireland", said it is a "matter for the data centres themselves to choose how they fuel and power themselves".

It is almost exactly the same as what Donald Trump said at the World Economic Forum, when he talked about doubling the amount of power produced to benefit data centres and AI. Trump was talking about coal but here it looks like being LNG, which the Taoiseach is planning to import wholesale from the US. All of the signs point towards the Government supporting a full commercial LNG terminal in Kerry, making Donald Trump and the Healy-Raes very happy but ignoring the science, which says that imported LNG is even dirtier than coal.

One of the first things Trump did when he came to office was to leave the Paris Agreement. We must not follow him in abandoning emissions reductions targets. There can be no more of this hypocrisy of imposing carbon taxes on ordinary people while allowing big tech to blow through the carbon budgets.

We already have the second most expensive electricity in Europe. More data centres will make this worse by driving the price of energy up even further. The new CRU policy envisages big tech profiteering from whatever electricity it supplies to the grid, saying that this can provide a revenue stream for them. It will be further privatisation, meaning even higher prices. Will the Taoiseach take the science seriously? Will he take climate change seriously? Will he try to avoid the €20 billion in fines the public will have to pay?

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