We will support the Bill on Committee Stage. I echo a lot of the comments made by Deputy Daly. The Bill is not perfect, but it is an important step in strengthening the regulatory landscape here. The motion to instruct the committee relates to the amendment to increase Bord na Móna's borrowing limit, and I have no principled objection to that. I understand that borrowing limits require updating due to inflation or increases in corporate activity, etc., and from the perspective of the Department it might not be worth creating a whole new Act in that regard. I want to take this opportunity to make some broader points about Bord na Móna. Most pertinently, I want to make the point that it is probably time it received a statutory overhaul of its mandate. It is no longer a turf development company. Clearly, it has ended all peat harvesting on its lands. The commercial sale of peat in Ireland was banned in 2022, or at least it was supposed to have been. Any turf left in Ireland is not for exploitation for commercial purposes. In fact, Bord na Móna is now involved in pretty much the exact opposite activity, in that it is remediating and re-wetting bogs. It is in the climate solutions business now and has taken on an important role as a renewable energy provider, which is great to see, with equally important responsibilities as a major landowner and environmental custodian. We know the difficulties the Government is having regarding land use, land use change, emissions coming from that sector and how much work needs to be done in that area. Bord na Móna will play a critical role in some of that. There has been substantial change in what Bord na Móna actually does, but it has made this change without any structural overhaul of the legislation underpinning it. The primary objectives of the company, as set out in the Turf Development Act, no longer apply. It has instead relied on ancillary objectives and powers throughout its so-called brown to green transition. I suggest that now that the transition period is more or less complete, it would be appropriate to bring forward new legislation to underpin the company's new role and clarify its mandate. The second point I would like to raise is the proposal to co-locate renewable infrastructure with massive data centres on Bord na Móna land, so-called energy parks. I am deeply uncomfortable with a semi-State body tasked with renewable infrastructure development having a strategic partnership with a tech giant like Amazon in the first place. As a matter of principle, I do not like that we are depending on it for funding. The energy transition must, first and foremost, be about people, just transition and nature restoration, and not satisfying the needs and wants of the world tech oligarchs. We already have a situation whereby data centres are sucking up virtually all of the renewable energy we are generating in this country, meaning that it is not going towards helping households move to cleaner sources or decarbonising our energy sector. These energy park proposals betray the Government's thinking. I generally fear that we are witnessing a corporate capture of clean energy in Ireland. We have to ask ourselves if plonking a 500 MW data centre on former bog land owned by a semi-State company is really the best use of our resources. That is as much electricity as is consumed by 325,000 homes. Where do we want our renewable energy to go? Do we want it to go to help households up and down the country which are still dependent on fossil fuels and currently being pilloried by their bills? Do we want to help them transition to cleaner renewable energy or do we want to help the tech giants? We have serious questions about the environmental biodiversity impacts these projects will have on lands that we need to re-wild or bogs that we may need to re-wet. The Labour Party has a view on that. The Department of enterprise seems to have taken its view. I would like to hear the views of the Minister of State's Department. I am sure he will say we need to consider our industrial strategy and so on, but the wind only seems to be blowing one direction, pardon the pun. Virtually everything we have seen from this Government so far with regard to renewable energy and energy more broadly seems to be to the overwhelming benefit of corporate interests. The private wires legislation, of which data centres will be the primary beneficiary, is another example. I echo the calls of other Members of the Opposition that the Minister, Deputy Burke, his officials and representatives from Bord na Móna and Amazon come before the climate committee to discuss these proposals. We need to get our priorities straight. We should not be building massive privately owned and operated data centres on what is, in effect, State land. We should not be building renewable infrastructure just to satisfy their insatiable demands.
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