Energy Policy: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Aidan Farrelly (SD), Kildare North

I thank colleagues for tabling the motion this evening. It is interesting that we have set the context that much of this is as a result of the war in Ukraine and the war in the Middle East. You would think the energy suppliers would start to feel that struggle as well, yet what we are seeing is record levels of profits among the energy suppliers. It is impossible to defend when you do not know where the attack is coming from. I am sure the Minister of State is hearing the same from people as those of us on this side that everything is going up. Literally everything is going up and we cannot understand why.
When colleagues across the House explain why this is happening, it is blatantly ignored to the extent that the Minister, Deputy O'Brien, just decides that the end of the debate is an hour before the end of the debate. I thank the Minister of State, Deputy Canney, for being here. I was at that public meeting in Naas. I do not know when the Minister of State was last in Naas, but Naas is unique for many reasons. One that it is probably not so proud of right now is the fact that it has land zoning specifically for data centre use. I am not aware of any other town in this country where lands are zoned specifically and only for data centres to build on. There is something significantly wrong with that. If nothing else comes from my input today, I ask the Minister of State to convey to the Minister a request to issue a circular to all local authorities to stop zoning land specifically for data centre use. We do not have the infrastructure, we do not have the resources and we are having to deny the fact that we are interfering with economic reports because apparently that is what happened with the Department over the summer. We have significant problems here. In Naas, that is one part of it, and it is a significant worry. We have done our bit in Ireland, and we are far in excess of holding the door open to invite people in, while trying to keep everybody quiet who is suffering at the hands of it. Some 24% of our energy use going to data centres is wrong when we are paying exorbitant fees.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17