I congratulate the Minister of State on her appointment and wish her well in the new role. I welcome this opportunity for us to have an informed debate on the positive implications of AI across our society, as well as the new risks it brings. As with any evolution in technological capability that has a widespread application, the public debate on this has been intense. In this environment the public requires clear and trustworthy information about how AI is being used in their daily lives, and in particular to ensure that the public interest is served, that individual rights and freedoms are protected from exploitation, and that the adoption of this technology is used within the boundary of our climate commitments. It is also important to establish some fundamental principles about what AI should be used for. AI has really innovative potential to bring hugely positive enhancement in our lives, but it has to work for the benefit of people and society. I very much welcome the EU's AI Act in that line. That regulation sets down critically important limitations on the use of AI, and I am proud of the strong influence the green group in the European Parliament had in ensuring there were guardrails placed in that regulation. Practices like biometric mass surveillance, AI systems that recognise gender or sexual orientation and AI-based predictive policing are among the most undemocratic and unethical practices that AI systems can be put to. Where an individual's rights and freedoms can be so effectively undermined at scale without that person being aware, that raises really worrying and fundamental questions. We also have to be clear about the identification of fake content. I will use a crude example. There is an image of me going around X at the moment saying that in an interview I leaked a secret of wealth generation. I did not, because I do not know that particular secret.

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That image is so crude that it can be easily spotted, but we have to be ready for the time when that content is absolutely indistinguishable from reality. We must also be upfront about the huge energy use that AI technology necessitates. As a country that already expends a disproportionate percentage of our energy generation on data centres, we need to acknowledge that the growth in AI use has huge potential to pressure the ability to achieve carbon reduction targets in Ireland and internationally. While acknowledging the role that data centres play in the wider IT sector, which is an important employer in Ireland, we have to be honest about the trade-offs in terms of less capacity for housing connections and in eating up new renewable energy capacity rather than allowing that new renewable energy capacity replace existing fossil fuel sources. We have to be honest that there are trade-offs to the new Government's stated policy of liberalising the granting of planning for additional data centres that the new policy will entail.

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