Plenty being discussed at Cabinet today!
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What are the key discussions happening at Cabinet today?
The Clare Byrne Show on Newstalk. With Aviva Insurance. Welcome back to Ballykilcavan Farm and Brewery here in County Leish. We're here as part of the Newstalk Summer Tour and I'm joined right beside me by Newstalk's political correspondent, Sean Defoe. You're welcome to Leish.
Thanks, Emile. I wish you'd passed on the memo we weren't supposed to touch the bar in the corner. That would have been helpful to know 20 minutes ago.
I hope you didn't because you could get us in big trouble. Like we have a clock with a timer on this, Sean. Stay away from the beer taps.
I just get this close to Strad Valley and I get that urge to pop a can and sit in a camp chair, you know.
I know, I think we all do, and today is the day for it. But we are talking about what's happening at Cabinet today with you, because there's a busy agenda up the road in Dublin. And the first thing I want to talk to you about is this news that Ireland is going to invest in these huge AI gigafactories. Now, before anybody has a panic, these are not going to be built, as far as we know, in Ireland, but we are investing along with the rest of the EU. Is that right?
Yes, so there's no massive panic that there's going to suddenly be this massive, mighty morphing data centre somewhere in the Midlands or anywhere else. And even the name of it, Gigafactories, I had to go and look it up to see exactly what they were. It's essentially a massive data centre, absolutely huge, requires the energy of about 200,000 homes to run these things. Absolutely massive. There's only about 200 of them in the world. 82% of them are in China. actually at the minute and what they're being used for is to train AI models so to farm all of this information from across the internet and everywhere else and train up the likes of your clothes and your chat GPTs and that's why the European Union is interested because right now they're predominantly in China and the US and we are taking advantage of this AI revolution but we're being fed stuff that's controlled by those other powers and there is a move at an EU level to sort of claw back some of the tech control isn't there is this part of that hundred
Yeah. So they're up to 20 billion euro is going to be spent by the EU in AI and on these these gigacenters, these gigafactories as well, because we can't rely on the US anymore as a reliable partner. And we obviously know China, Russia, other world actors all want their own influence on the EU. And the EU officials are very, very worried about that. Where Ireland comes into this is we're not going to host one because, frankly, it would destroy the electronic grid and so controversial data centres anyway, the small ones, let alone the massive big ones. But we are going to invest 10 to 20 million euro, Minister James Lawless is bringing this to Cabinet this morning, into one that's going to be built in France with the view that Irish researchers and academics would then have access to it and be able to use it and train up language models that we might be using and AI that we might be using here.
A total of five of them plan to be built across Europe and basically They want a piece of it, but know that politically there's not a hope in hell Ireland could ever host one.
Okay, now we move on to pharmacies being given additional responsibilities around contraception and the free contraceptive scheme. So this is about taking the pressure off GPs, is it, and allowing the pharmacist to do more?
Yeah, you might remember there's a memo a few months ago from Jennifer Carl McNeil with eight other things, including conjunctivitis medicine that pharmacists would be able to provide and prescribe without you having to go to a GP. And what the department is saying essentially is they want pharmacists to act up, is maybe the wrong way to put it, to the full nature of their qualifications and to do as much as they can to take pressure off of areas where GPs are quite hard to find. they're so highly qualified and there was always a sense that maybe those skills weren't being used to best effect so here we go and even you go into a pharmacist they'll advise you as well or better than any gp if you need something for a dodgy toe or whatever it happens to be this in this case it's the free contraceptive scheme the change is so you'll still have to go to a gp to get your first prescription
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