Why is the Government using its Presidency of the European Council to propose a massive undermining of the right of privacy of European citizens? The Irish Presidency has a proposal for the digital omnibus, which is a deregulation agenda in the interests of big tech. What it proposes is that, effectively, GDPR be disapplied when it comes to AI. As a result, the use of personal data will be presumed to be lawful as long as it is being used in terms of AI. This means that what currently would be illegal, which is col…

I thank Deputy Ahern and the Labour Party for bringing forward this Bill. I congratulate the Deputy on his first Bill . He will be happy to hear that, unlike the Government, we will be supporting it. We support what is an attempt to place some limits on data centres being automatically allowed to connect to the national electricity grid, regardless of any consideration of environmental and social costs. We think the time for moderate measures has passed. We should not be having any more data centres connecting to t…

I move amendment No. 1 to amendment No. 1: To delete all words from "notes that the Government:" to "will seek to address this as part of Budget 2027" and substitute the following: "recognises that: — working people, families, students, households and pensioners are facing renewed and significant increases in the cost of fuel and energy, as well as increases in public transport fares, adding further pressure to an already severe cost-of-living crisis; and — the Government is directly contributing to this cost-of-li…

Deputy O'Flynn explicitly supported the kidnapping in Venezuela.

It is almost two years since Dr. Abu Safiya was detained by the Israeli occupying forces. His crime was to not abandon his hospital in Gaza. He is being held in solitary confinement. He is being kicked, beaten and tortured every single day. He has not been charged with any crimes. He is just one of hundreds of thousands of victims of Israel's genocide, brutality and occupation. It is scandalous that the Minister stands in this Chamber again and again to talk about genocide but he will not say that our football team…

Do something then.

This Bill sums up everything that is wrong with the Government's approach to disability services in this country. We have a crisis, with families crying out for help, and here we have a Bill that is not about investing in the health and education professionals needed to operate a properly functioning system. The Bill is not about addressing that in Chamber House CDNT, where well over 1,000 files simply have not been opened, there is a vacancy rate of more than 50% in some professions and a rate of one third across …

On an annualised basis on a five-year-----

The Minister is defending the indefensible. That is why he did not really engage with it. He is defending the fact that, when 300,000 people are in arrears on their electricity bills, data centres owned by the richest and most powerful companies in the world are paying half the price the poorest people in the country are expected to pay. He is defending the absolutely indefensible. He is saying that we cannot possibly say that these, the richest companies in the world, which provide very few jobs as we will get ont…

Why? It is because we cannot meet any of our targets. We are going to reach a point well under half of our targets, which are supposed to be legally binding, because the data centres have gobbled up all of the renewable energy. Sometimes when the Minister talks about this he gives the impression that, as long as we keep adding renewable energy, it is good for the climate. The climate does not care. The planet cares about the amount of greenhouse gases. If you are adding extra renewables but all of that additional c…

Earlier, the Minister said that 19,000 are directly employed in data centres. Does the Minister stand over that?

Great, because he will have to correct the record later as that is not what is in his record. The Minister knows he is fiddling the figures because that 19,000 figure - it is 19,500 - is coming from the KPMG report, on which the Minister spent €105,000 of public money to get. He told them we only want this outcome, that is, to say data centres are really important. Most of those jobs are construction jobs. There are not 19,000 people in working data centres directly in this country. The Minister knows that is not t…

They could be building houses. That is the other way this is affecting the housing crisis. There are more than 10,000 of these workers who are spending their time building data centres and they are purely temporary jobs. The KPMG report actually says these jobs will disappear once we have built all of the data centres. The workers could instead be building housing. What is the actual figure? How many people actually work in data centres? The Minister's own report, which is a report designed to support the case for …

The Tánaiste told us we would have a budget for people who get up early in the morning to go to work but not if they get up early in the morning and go out to get a bus, Luas or train. The Government is saying those people will pay more than an extra €100 per year for the privilege of being on public transport that is inadequate and overcrowded. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, they are expected to fork out over €100 more per year. The NTA acknowledges fewer people will use public transport as a result. Th…

This Government is, in a way, in an envious position. It has the capacity, in terms of a massive budget surplus, to protect people from the cost-of-living crisis. It is probably a position that governments across the world would like to be in. The Government can protect people from the cost-of-living crisis but instead chooses to impose extra costs on people. It is quite incredible. It is a targeted attack on those people who use public transport. It makes no sense from the point of view of the cost-of-living crisi…

At this very moment, council tenants from Mac Uilliam are outside South Dublin County Council offices, together with activists from the local Community Action Tenants Union, CATU, branch, protesting because they are at their wits' end about the maintenance issues and the serious problems of disrepair in their homes. They do not want to be at this point. They have tried everything in terms of engaging with the council, including individually doing representations. I have been inside their homes and the conditions ar…

There is one lesson for me from today's farce, and it is that the Government is scared of the people. The only reason we are here today is that the Government is scared of widespread protests about the cost-of-living crisis. In response, we have a two-month stay of execution for petrol and diesel costs alone. It is completely inadequate when the cost-of-living crisis, driven by Trump's imperialist adventures in the Middle East, is worsening for working people right across the board. What people want and need are ce…

Could it be NATO?

I, too, want to ask about the senior Minister. This came up at the Dáil reform committee last week. It is very peculiar that a senior Minister is here and has answered previous questions on the triple lock today and then – no offence meant - we have the junior Minister answering these questions, which precisely prevents the continuation of the debate. The same thing happened previously.

Hopefully the junior Minister will be able to clarify. The Minister, Deputy McEntee, said earlier to Deputy Ó Laoghaire, "The people I speak to do not like the fact that Russia has essentially removed, or will remove in the coming months, all our peacekeeping troops from UNIFIL". I ask the junior Minister to clarify on the Minister's behalf that presumably she did not mean Russia but, rather, the US and Israel, and that is misinformation she read into the record. I also ask him to clarify why the draft Bill refers …