Data Centres Dail Éireann — 2025-12-18 ============================================================ Timmy Dooley (FF), Clare The Deputy has to look at it from a Government perspective. We have to ensure the economy remains robust and that we have a strategy in place to ensure - based on the sector trends - that we are able to attract investment in order to continue to provide employment for what is a growing population. Sometimes, others bury their heads in the sand - I am not suggesting Deputy Murphy does - and say that data centres are bad and that we cannot facilitate them any more. The Government does not agree with that position. The direction of travel in relation to the tech sector and the way we live our lives means that so much more is done in a cloud-based environment. You cannot, on the one hand, be of the view that we should have a strong economy and, on the other, ignore the fundamental building blocks of what that future economy will look like and operate. There is a requirement, and we have to live within the terms of the EU directive. As already stated, data centres, like all large energy users, have to exist within the boundaries of our climate legislation and targets. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. 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