I too congratulate the Minister of State on her appointment. I thank the Labour Party for bringing forward the motion. I am a member of the Oireachtas committee on AI. We have listened to many academic and expert contributions concerning data centres, energy and climate change. As stated, 22% of our electricity is consumed by data centres. The country coming anywhere close to this is Singapore. To put this into context as it stands, this is an unprecedented percentage per capita in a developed economy. The Minister of State must also be aware that EirGrid has already acknowledged it will be a challenging position to keep supply to these data centres until 2028 and will likely stretch beyond that. We in Sinn Féin challenge the Government's postcolonial strategy specifically on industrialisation by invitation. We must have meant governance and tackle the environmental impacts and implications on our own citizens. For example, taxpayers are footing the bill for grid upgrades. Between 2015 and 2023, Irish taxpayers paid €750 million extra for their electricity. We had the second-highest electricity prices in the EU in the second half of 2025. We also have more than 500,000 people in gas and electricity arrears. On 1 July, we will see the price of domestic electricity and gas units increase by 9.5% per unit. At present, domestic units are charged at roughly 36.8 cent per kilowatt while data centres' prices are 19.1 cents per kilowatt. The Government's amendment refers to its large energy user plan. We ask the Minister of State to revisit this plan as it has the potential to lock in our energy sector, effectively locking private tech solutions, including more fossil fuel gases, into our energy grid. This action threatens our public energy legislation that has been in place since the foundation of the State. There should be no unnecessary trade-offs or cost of doing business if it allows mechanisms of backdoor privatisation on our national energy sector.

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