Mary Lou McDonald
Ceist:17. Deputy Mary Lou McDonald asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [12443/23]
Amharc ar fhreagraWednesday, 29 March 2023
Ceisteanna (17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22)
Ivana Bacik
Ceist:18. Deputy Ivana Bacik asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [15090/23]
Amharc ar fhreagra
Richard Boyd Barrett
Ceist:19. Deputy Richard Boyd Barrett asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [15153/23]
Amharc ar fhreagra
Bríd Smith
Ceist:20. Deputy Bríd Smith asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [15156/23]
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Gary Gannon
Ceist:21. Deputy Gary Gannon asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [14894/23]
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Mick Barry
Ceist:22. Deputy Mick Barry asked the Taoiseach if he will report on his Department's resource-efficiency action plan. [15253/23]
Amharc ar fhreagraFreagraí ó Béal (8 píosaí cainte)
I propose to take Questions Nos. 17 to 22, inclusive, together.
The Department's 2022 resource-efficiency action plan sets out a range of actions to improve the management of energy, water, material and waste resources within the Department and to increase sustainability awareness among staff. It also includes measures on levels of energy and water usage and waste produced by the Department so improvements can be tracked and measured following the implementation of planned actions.
The implementation of the actions set out in the plan is overseen by the Department's green team, with progress made to date, including the retrofitting of all light fittings with LEDs and the installation of sensor lighting; increasing energy awareness among staff via workshops and regular communications; the installation of sensor taps in the main bathroom areas; the installation of brown waste bins and recycling stations; the removal of desk bins on a voluntary basis; and the installation of covered bicycle parking facilities at Government Buildings to encourage cycling.
As part of the Reduce Your Use public sector campaign, initiated in 2022 to reduce energy use by up to 15% in public buildings, the Department has reduced the hours of heating by 14% and external lighting by 75%. From 2023, under the Government's climate action plan, the Department is required to publish a new climate action roadmap to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by more than half by 2030 and increase the improvement in energy efficiency from the 33% target in 2020 to 50% by 2030. The first iteration of the climate action roadmap for the Department of the Taoiseach has been developed with the assistance of the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland and will be published in the coming weeks. This will incorporate actions on the wider energy efficiency initiated through the resource-efficiency action plan process.
Has the Department green procurement policies that relate to all procurement? It was intended in an earlier iteration of the action plan to consider various services used by the Department. With regard to the procurement of vehicles for the Department, there is an electric vehicle, EV, policy pathway that states the Department should be considering procuring EVs instead of vehicles with internal combustion engines. The Taoiseach mentioned LED lighting in respect of the retrofitting of buildings. Is there a plan to address the fabric of buildings?
The Taoiseach set out some of the resource-efficiency practices that have been put in place in Government Buildings, including through the provision of bicycle parking facilities. That is very welcome but I ask the Taoiseach to use his influence with the OPW, Houses of the Oireachtas Commission and the Ceann Comhairle to ensure cycle-friendly, active-travel-friendly measures are implemented here in Leinster House. For some years now, I and several other cyclists have been trying to get covered bicycle-parking facilities put in place at Leinster House. What we have currently are a few derisory bike racks. There are no covers for those of us who cycle in the rain, who regularly get soaked. There is an embarrassment of cars parked everywhere around the Leinster House campus. I had visitors recently from the British Labour Party. Mr. Peter Kyle, the shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, was here on Monday but a large SUV was parked right in front of the front door of Leinster House. That should be the flagship area. Regularly people, including visiting dignitaries, congregate there to get their photographs taken. It is unacceptable and embarrassing that we still have not got visible, bicycle-friendly parking facilities in our Houses of Parliament, even as we hear from the Taoiseach about the very welcome measures being adopted to ensure better bike-parking facilities in Government Buildings. It is just one small thing but it could make a huge difference in terms of sending out a powerful signal about our ambition to target the catastrophe of climate change and reduce our emissions as a State institution.
I wish to take the Taoiseach up on something he said about the State most likely being slower than the private sector regarding retrofitting and the construction of social housing, for example. On the construction of social housing, there is a PPP being developed across three local authority areas to build a relatively small number of social housing units. In the four-year timeline given by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, which was involved in two of the PPPs, by far the biggest time lag in the delivery of social housing was associated with the tendering process concerning private contractors. In fact, Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Services has said procurement issues to do with going to the private sector are a major problem, far bigger than Part 8 planning or anything like that, which takes only a few weeks. I put it to the Taoiseach that the opposite of what he said is the truth. In other words, the tendering process involving private contractors, the competition related to those contractors and the possibility that they will go out of business, which happens very regularly, comprise the major factor delaying the delivery of public projects, whether they involve building houses or retrofitting houses. If we had our own directly employed labour force with the requisite skills and professions, we could send people out directly to do the work.
We have probably all known for a while now that data centre operators have been developing their own energy capacity in recent years. We are all aware of the danger of the blackouts we were warned would occur over the winter months. These did not happen but the full extent of generation capacity has only recently been learned and revealed. It indicates just how considerable the energy demand of the centres has become. The likes of Microsoft, Amazon and Google, along with other data centres, are organising on-site gas capacity that would, if combined, meet the generation needs of the entire country. It is very much the intention to back up their energy needs with all this gas.
I put this to the Taoiseach in the context of the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. That report has given us a last warning to reduce our emissions, end of story. The scale at which our emissions would go up should the data centres start to use the extra capacity is absolutely startling and frightening. It would undo all the targets we have set ourselves. The proliferation of the data centres is such that we really need to ask ourselves what we are doing in this country. It is utter madness. Eight of 16 are hyper-scale and due to come on board in the next couple of years. That is on top of the 40-plus that are already feeding off our national grid. We need to ask the question seriously, investigate the matter, be absolutely honest with ourselves and stop protecting the multinationals.
I thank the Deputies. On the question on protecting multinationals, the Government works with multinationals. We encourage them to invest here. There are 300,000 people in the State who work for multinationals, including in my constituency and that of the Deputy. Owing to the number employed and the contracts the multinationals issue, there are probably another 200,000 or 300,000 people indirectly employed by them. They also pay billions of euro in corporate tax. While they might not be angels, I guarantee the Deputy that this country would be a lot worse off if it did not have the employment and revenue.
Data centres do not provide many jobs.
I believe my Department has green procurement policies. I am not 100% sure, but I am not 100% sure for a very good reason, that is, the fact that I have no role in procurement. That is a matter for the Secretary General. I have no role whatsoever in awarding any contracts to any companies on behalf of my Department.
I was asked about vehicles. The Department does not have any vehicles, or at least none that I am aware of. An EV charger has been in place in Government Buildings for quite some time. We have two covered bike racks. It took ages to get it done but they are now done and are very nice. In my previous Department, the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, and very much led by my Secretary General at the time, Dr. Orlaigh Quinn, we put bees on the roof to produce our own honey and have plans to put solar on the roof as well. I would like us to do the same in Government Buildings. It is a big roof space. I have been up there. There is an old helipad from the past that is no longer used that would be great for solar, bees and pollinators. This is something I am working on but, again, it needs the approval of my Secretary General and the OPW for that to be done. The other thing I would like to do is at least experiment with rewilding or allowing a wildflower meadow to develop on the green area outside Government Buildings, as has been done outside Trinity College. It is not going to change the world or the environment or make a huge difference in terms of biodiversity or emissions, but it would be a good statement, so greening our building is something I am working on. It is very much up to the Houses of the Oireachtas Commission to make decisions regarding the Oireachtas but I do appoint members to it and I will certainly discuss it with the members I have appointed to it.
I do not think Deputy Boyd Barrett is wrong about public-private partnerships. Sometimes they can take a long time. Grangegorman is one example. Direct contracts can also take a long time. The national children's hospital might be an example of that, but in the round as opposed to the minority, I do think it takes the State longer to do things than the private sector and it does generally cost more - often for good reasons because the staff are paid more and have better pensions and a transparent procurement process must be gone through when it involves anything to do with public money and the State. There has been a study, which I have not read in a long time so I would have to go back to it, that compared how long it takes Dublin City Council, for example, to build social housing and the cost relative to the private sector doing it. I think that showed there was a premium to be paid if it was done by a public body rather than privately.
It is a good thing that people who were not aware are now aware that data centres have enormous generating capacity of their own. They are power stations as well as being data storage facilities. A very false narrative was put across last year that data centres were going to suck electricity out of the grid and leave us all facing power cuts. We on this side of the House at least always knew and understood that data centres have their own generating capacity, and if it was the case that we ever ran into energy security issues or faced brownouts or blackouts, we would have been asking the data centres to help us and not the other way round.