Naoise Ó Muirí (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There has been a lot of hype and hot air over AI in general in recent years. Often, this has to do with consultants, sectors and groups trying to hype it up for commercial reasons. Many hope to make lots of money rolling out AI, implementing it and dealing with queries.

If, like me, you buy into AI – it is a fact of life we are going to have to deal and work with – you will realise that, in reality, it just involves the analysis of a whole lot of data, requiring a lot more computing power. That is where computing power comes in. It presents an opportunity for regional development in a way we have not had before. Deputy McAuliffe just mentioned energy. Onshore wind energy along the west coast is in surplus, and I hope this will eventually be the case for offshore wind energy. It will get better and better. Down the years, there has been great difficulty in having industrial development on that side of the country. As Lord Mayor, I did dog and pony shows with companies coming into the Dublin region. They wanted to invest only in Dublin. It was not a case of investing in Donegal or Dublin; it was Dublin or nowhere. We should now be considering an industrial development strategy to put the data centres on the west coast, not in Dublin. The grid in Dublin is at capacity. The generation of power is at capacity and it is difficult to do more in the Dublin region. However, the west coast and western region, from Mayo all the way up to Donegal, is ripe for development because of wind energy. For data, you need good links or connections. All the transatlantic cables come ashore in the region. The workforce requirements are limited enough but of high value once the infrastructure is in place and there is power. Power is the key. While there would be data centres on this side of the country importing power from the UK and farther afield, there could be data centres the other side of the country working off renewables. Moving wind-generated power from one side of the country to the other, from west to east, is expensive and requires a lot of infrastructure, so why do we not use the data centres needed for AI to rebalance development in favour of the western region? It is an opportunity and we should really look into it a lot more.

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