Rosi Leonard

Thanks, Clare.

Yeah, and just to echo what Caroline said, like we totally agree and we've been sounding the alarm on this for many, many years and it echoes lots of organisations in Ireland saying,

have said over the years, like recently, just last week, we had a report or two weeks ago from the Climate Change Advisory Council that said that data centres were potentially cannibalising new renewables on the system, which makes it really, really hard to ensure access to clean energy for everyone else.

And this also, I mean, it also comes on the back of a visit that we had in spring of this year from Astrid Rhianna Puentes, Special Rapporteur on the Right to a Clean and Healthy Environment.

She visited Ireland and she mentioned data centres as a massive concern during her visit, particularly around transparency and public access to information.

And just to kind of echo something that Caroline mentioned, which I thought was quite striking, there is an issue around trust and public faith here in terms of data centres.

And I think that the public has been asked to take quite a big hit on our energy system, on our bills because of data centre expansion.

But there's a huge lack of transparency around the industry that we get in return.

And that's a really major issue.

Like only one in six data centres in Ireland even submit a data to us.

European Energy Efficiency Directive which is something that they have to do every year to kind of give data on very basic environmental requirements and that's one of the worst rates in Europe.

Absolutely it does and just last week we actually published a report on this authored by Dr Sean Fearon and in that he shows that yes households in Ireland have paid

a significant amount of extra additional costs on their electricity bills due to the impact that data centres have on wholesale prices.

So over the last 10 years,

cumulatively Irish households paid over €750 million extra on their bills due to data centres.

And that figure, if we look forward to the next 10 years, that's set to rise up to €1.6 billion.

So, you know, data centres are having an impact on living in Ireland and on bills.

And the crucial line there is in time.

You know, the reality now in Ireland is we don't have this offshore wind, but we do have this massive data centre demand.

So realistically, at the moment in Ireland, it's very clear, and this UN University report echoes this, Ireland is