Energy Policy
Dail Éireann — 2025-12-18
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Timmy Dooley (FF), Clare

I will be answering a question from Deputy Paul Murphy shortly on data centres but suffice to say that in the view of the Government data centres are a really important component of our growing economy and of the future in relation to the technological investment that we get here. Ireland has always been attractive to foreign direct investment which has been a bedrock of our industrial, economic and employment policy. There is little doubt that in recent years the focus has shifted from the pharmaceutical and medtech sectors, although both are still really fundamental drivers of our economy, and a new wave of investment is coming in data storage and the high-tech sector. Behind that, data centres are required. Efforts are often made by some in this House to suggest that this is some kind of folly but data centres today are what the advance factories were in the 1970s and 1980s.
They drive the economy, our education system, our hospitals and our banking system. Effectively, they are a repository for the information that sits behind the way we live our lives now. This is not just something we can just cast aside, bury our heads in the sand and say we should ignore it. We need to be mindful of that. If data centres do not end up in Ireland, they will end up somewhere else and we will lose out in the long term. However, I accept that we have to manage this matter.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-12-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:29+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-12-18