I did support the climate Act. The Government is not implementing it.

Will the Minister correct the record in respect of the climate Act?

It was recently reported that householders collectively paid approximately €454 million per year in capacity payments to data centres between 2007 and 2018. Since then, it has more than doubled to €1 billion per year. With 11 more data centres under construction and applications for 30 more, this massive subsidy from ordinary people to data centres is only going to grow. Is the Government going to do nothing to stop data centres from pushing up household energy costs?

That sounded like an admission that data centres are pushing up household energy prices. The Minister of State might confirm that the Government accepts that is happening. That means the crazy data centre policy of the Government to allow big tech to come here and dump as much of this 21st century toxic waste as it can is not only driving us further from our climate goals, where the extra energy used by data centres is more than the extra renewable energy we have added to the grid through wind power since 2017, but…

On the question of jobs, the Minister of State might confirm how many jobs are directly in data centres. Would I be correct in saying that there are fewer than 3,000 jobs in data centres? For a sector that is going to be using 30% of our electricity by 2030, the waste of electricity and water, and the impact that has on housing construction and other issues, is quite incredible. We recently found out that by 2032, 9% of gas demand will be coming from just the 11 islanded data centres that are currently connected di…

No, it is not. It is not at all.

Does the Minister of State know how much extra energy we are going to need?

I am sure I will be very satisfied with the Minister’s answer. We are in April, the fourth month of the year, and the Minister still has not published the climate action plan for 2025. Will the Minister tell me when it is going to be published? What has the Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael-Lowry Government taken out from the draft plan that was submitted last December, before it came into office? What are the big new actions in it that will close the massive gap with our emissions target?

Some 3.5 million pigs are slaughtered in Ireland every year. We do not see them much because they are largely confined indoors, in big metal sheds. However, thanks to undercover investigations by the National Animal Rights Association and Animal Rebellion, we know what is going on inside these sheds, and real horrors are happening to these pigs. Six farms have been randomly selected and have had undercover investigations in them, and you really do not want to watch the videos of the kind of conditions these pigs en…

Does the Minister think this kind of treatment of pigs is acceptable, and will the Government bring in legislation to stop it?

I move: That leave be granted to introduce a Bill entitled an Act to amend the Housing (Miscellaneous Provisions) Act, 1992 to provide for minimum Building Energy Rating (BER) standards for private rented accommodation and for related matters. My office was first approached by the Irish Green Building Council about bringing in minimum BER standards for the private rented sector. I thank the council and Friends of the Earth, which has also been supportive of us introducing this important legislation. The Bill makes …

I move: "That the Bill be taken in Private Members' time."

It is incredible to listen to TD after TD from the Opposition but also from the Government give out about all the failures of Irish Water, which are very real, and appeal for intervention by the Minister. I will do the same in a moment, but it speaks to the failure of Irish Water as an institution, the only real rationale of which was to take the public assets previously in the hands of local authorities, tie them up in a bow and prepare them for privatisation. That plan, certainly of full-frontal privatisation, wa…

While there is a lot of rhetoric in this debate about protecting workers, it is necessary to take the veil away from some of that rhetoric from the Government and some Opposition parties. Behind that veil, what they are really talking about is protecting the big US multinationals that have operations here, acting on the basis that big pharma and tech have the same interests as workers. That is simply not true. Look at Apple, which fought tooth and nail alongside our own Government to not pay us €14 billion in corpo…

We really need to take time this week to debate the HIQA report and to try to learn some lessons from the horrific abuse of some children at Temple Street hospital. The Taoiseach made the point earlier that the insertion of springs should not have happened and that responsibility lies with the surgeon. I agree 100%. The question, however, is how that was allowed to happen and to continue. If it was not for a whistleblower, a series of parliamentary questions and the reporting of The Ditch , this could still be happ…

I want to raise the crucial issue of child well-being in terms of children with scoliosis, in particular three children who had unauthorised metal springs inserted in them by a surgeon. The report was published at 12 noon, so I have only had the chance to read the executive summary so far but it makes for pretty horrifying reading, including making the point that the type of metal is "known to corrode in the presence of moisture". In other words, it could have effectively been rusting in children, which is horrific…

Just last week, a plane from Lufthansa flew through Irish airspace carrying about a tonne of munitions to Israel to be used in the horrific genocide in Gaza. I watched a video just yesterday on social media of a beheaded baby in Gaza. Tens of tonnes of munitions have passed through Irish airspace on their way to Israel to murder innocent people. This is not legal. Unless these flights have exemptions, and I understand these flights do not have exemptions, they are not allowed to do it. There seems to be no conseque…

We were battered off the roads in Rossport.

There was Rossport.

I am sure the Minister of State has probably been inundated as I have - probably more so than me - with emails from worried leaving cert students, parents and teachers about the unfair disadvantage that this year's students will be put at due to the Government's grade deflation proposals. This is not just a question of next year or the year after. It is something that will have an impact on young people for the rest of their lives. An email from one worried parent put the problem very well. It stated that the stude…