Electricity Regulation (Climate Action and Connection to Distribution and Transmission Systems) Bill 2025: Second Stage [Private Members] Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24 ============================================================ Ciarán Ahern (LAB), Dublin South-West It is a comprehensive report. It is worth the Minister of State’s time to read and consider it. I have a couple more points in response to the Minister of State. He mentioned that Ireland’s industrial electricity demand is primarily concentrated in our digital economy and that this is our core energy-intensive industry. That is fine but what is happening at the moment is that multiple Ministers are using this argument to justify continuing the status quo in their own Departments - by " status quo ", I mean continuing high levels of emissions. It is fine to say that a justification for data centres is that we do not have any other heavy industry. However, I heard the Minister for agriculture on the radio the other morning using it as justification for continued high emissions in the agriculture sector. Ministers say that we do not have any heavy industry here, and now, this is our heavy industry. If that is the Government’s argument, it can only be used once. The Minister of State can talk to his colleagues about that. The Minister of State also referred to Germany and other countries consuming more electricity to support their heavy industries, which is the case, but in Germany, the level of electricity used for heavy industry is about 25% of its energy. We are rapidly approaching that now with our use of data centres. Again, this is something to watch out for. The Government’s ultimate logic for opposing my Bill is that the CRU already has these powers. That is great - job done. I suppose the logic of everything I have said concerns the impact of the increased reliance on and use of fossil fuels rather than renewables. All of that still stands. If the CRU does have the powers it requires, I would like to see the Government pushing it to go further with its connection policy - further than the six-year, do-nothing glide path for connection to the grid, and further than just 80% renewables. If data centres are said to be so vital to retaining ICT jobs and, crucially, corporation tax in this country, and if it is the Government’s position that data centres are the anchor for those jobs, I would query that. We have very low corporation tax compared to international competitors. We have a highly educated, relatively young, English-speaking workforce. There are plenty of reasons tech jobs are here. They were here before the data centres came. I am not sure data centres play such a huge role in anchoring jobs here. However, if that is the Government’s argument, and if it is the Government’s position that it wants to continue to build data centres, all that is Bill was proposing to do, and all I am asking at this point in time, is to try to do that in as sustainable a way as possible. I understood previously that the CRU’s hands were tied by a lack of this power. The Government is telling me today that the CRU’s hands are not tied, and that it has the power to do this and potentially to do more. I would love to see that happen. I thank all the contributors for speaking today. I appreciate it. --- 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/2026-09-24/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00 Sitting date: 2026-09-24