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?

I thank the Deputy. The Taoiseach to respond.

Will the Taoiseach abandon the plan to import expensive-----

I thank the Deputy. His time is up.

-----and dirty fossil fuels from America and will he reverse the course on data centres?

First of all, the Deputy is referring to the publication of the Commission on the Regulation of Utilities large energy users connection policy minded-to decision paper. It is a mouthful, but it is an important document. It is not as the Deputy has described it, by the way. I think a lot of people on the industrial side might see a bit of progress in this but it will take a lot of detailed reading. It seems to me that the hard left in this country - the Deputy represents that - decided some time ago that data centres were to be the new enemy of the people, in our economy and in society. I have watched in here as, one after another, Deputies have started to ratchet up language about the threat data centres pose. At first, it did not make any sense to me because the Deputy is as prolific a user of the services provided by data centres as anybody else is - probably more so. The new hostility to data centres is about the manifestation of the Deputy's eternal struggle against the great western capitalist evil. That is what it is. I ask the Deputy a simple question. He is hostile to the economic model, and that is fair enough. He does not agree with the economic model that has grown Ireland over the past 50 years, but we need to have sustainable development of our energy and data network. The CRU itself describes data centres as "a core infrastructure enabler of a technology-rich, innovative economy". We can ban data centres in their entirety but we need to follow up by asking the hard questions of what happens to the economy, workers and industry.

Hear, hear.

We will pay higher bills with the Taoiseach's policy.

Are we saying we do not want to participate in the AI revolution? The AI revolution is the most profound economic revolution currently occurring since the 19th century industrial revolution. It is, but it has a problem.

Who told you that, Elon Musk?

Deputy, please.

AI uses enormous amounts of energy. That is a problem. The US says it will be fossil fuels. The French say it will be nuclear power. Ireland will have wind energy but there will be a gap in between. When the wind starts to flow - offshore wind in particular - we hope there will 5 GW by 2030 and more in 2031 and 2032. We cannot shut the door on data centres in an absolutist way, which is what the Deputy is essentially proposing. We would damage our economy if we did that. It would damage workers in particular and their prospects for the future. We would be sending a signal that we do not want to participate in an evolving, growing, innovative economy that will develop despite us. There will be massive investment in AI across Europe.

I thank the Taoiseach. The Deputy to respond.

We need to solve the problems that the data centres throw up, and they do throw up challenges.