A report published today by Friends of the Earth has found that energy demand from data centres has added three quarters of a billion euro to household bills in Ireland since 2015 and could add a further €1.5 billion over the next decade. This is the equivalent of adding a week's wages to bills for the poorest households. All of us here acknowledge that data centres are part of modern life but the circle the Tánaiste and his Government need to square is that if it is their industrial policy to continue to roll out energy-intensive data centres around the country, it is becoming a cost-of-living issue. We have been going on for years about the climate impacts. The Tánaiste's former colleague, Paschal Donohoe, talked about the water demands of data centres but this is now becoming a serious cost-of-living issue. If it is Government policy to allow unfettered growth in data centres, what is it going to do to ensure that it does not impose additional costs on households already struggling to pay their bills?

The Friends of the Earth report needs to be read in the round. It does basically put it up to us, as a Government and an Oireachtas, that if we can do more to speed up the move to renewables, under what it calls high renewable growth scenarios, annual average residual demand, including data centres actually falls below zero in the years ahead.

In other words, accelerated renewable development is presented in this study as sufficient to displace significant reliance on gas as a dispatchable source of energy in the future. As the Deputy acknowledged, there is a genuine economic benefit to data centres but I would dispute the characterisation of the Government's position as an unfettered approach. The CRU's large energy user, LEU, connection policy very much shows how the Government intends to deliver on its renewable energy targets, with data centres above certain thresholds being required to meet at least 80% of their annual demand with new additional renewable electricity generated in the Republic of Ireland.