Welcome to a new Ireland community in the fediverse. Any suggestions or concerns in relation to this community please put them in this thread.

tras phostáilte ó https://lemmy.world/post/48635944

Over 1,200,000 signatures so far.

Keep going. We need to show our leaders that the phrase "the Union shall uphold and promote its values", does not include the values of a genocide economy.

The Father Ted actor plays the character Colleen O'Rourke. I'm not far into it yet, but she seems to have a relatively minor role as a Weyland-Yutani reasarcher and advisor.

Crossposted from https://mander.xyz/post/53768257

wild of rté to call this controversial & that it's drawn criticism, imo, but fair play to the councillors keeping at it! 🙌

Why is the story Ireland tells itself about data centres so different from elsewhere? It’s another fantasy that’s nice to believe

Irish exceptionalism is an interesting thing. In the 2000s, our property market was sui generis, it was just that nobody else understood our particular brand of originality, until ... well, you know. Our corporate tax take and its density in a handful of companies is unmatched in its inimitability. Now, look over there. We don’t “do” the far right because Irish people are uniquely sound. Please ignore the arson, riots and racism. As for the scale of data centre development and its impact? As you already you know, we’re special. This stance on important aspects of our economy and society is akin to that of a deluded friend declaring that he’s not crazy, it’s everyone else who’s mad.

A number of things connected to the world of data centres happened in recent weeks, offering Government an incantation that breaks the spell of exceptionalism. It’s called perspective. A report by Friends of the Earth Ireland and Beyond Fossil Fuels, The Cost of Data Centres, estimated that the average household may have paid around €360 in additional electricity costs between 2015 and 2023 due to the pressure data centres put on the grid.

Minister for Finance Simon Harris said it’s easy to say data centres are the “bogeyman”, an emotive term designed to deflect justified critique. But people know the cost of their bills, and their relative expensiveness is backed up by data. The Household Energy Price Index recently published stats for May, with Dublin the most expensive capital in the EU for electricity, 52 per cent higher than the European average. In April, Eurostat found that for medium-sized household customers, Ireland had the highest electricity prices in the EU for the second half of 2025.

Last week, a report on the environmental cost of AI’s energy use by the UN academic body the Institute for Water, Health and Environment, spotlit Ireland in one section. “Ireland offers a cautionary example of local grid stress from concentrated digital infrastructure,” the report said. “Ireland’s experience highlights the need for responsible siting and capacity planning so that rapid AI infrastructure growth does not outpace local power systems.”

Darragh O’Brien – who is Minister for Transport and also Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment – went on the Irish Times Inside Politics podcast and said Ireland was not going to meet its legally binding target to halve carbon emissions by 2030. Fines for missing this well-signposted target could be between €8 billion and €26 billion. This is entirely, depressingly predictable.

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All of this coincided, with almost farcical timing, with a Department of Enterprise-commissioned report, authored by KPMG, titled The Value of Data Centres to Ireland. A few pages in, the study starts to feel like it should be accompanied by a laugh track. It declares data centres in Ireland underpin €104 billion in GVA (gross value added) and 876,000 jobs. KPMG is a serious consultancy but these are not serious figures. You simply cannot attribute that many Irish jobs to data centres, no more than you can attribute every job in Ireland people travel to by car to the existence of traffic lights.

Even the Minister of State at the Department of Climate, Energy and the Environment, Timmy Dooley, doesn’t think that. If he did, he wouldn’t have referred to Ireland’s data centre ecosystem as “supporting tens of thousands of jobs” when speaking in late May at the launch of another report, this one commissioned by the data centre lobby group Digital Infrastructure Ireland. Tens of thousands? I thought it was 876,000.

As for how much electricity is being used by data centres in Ireland, the KPMG study compares the percentages of data centre electricity consumption plus other non-residential electricity consumption to those of European countries. In Ireland, this totals 73 per cent of electricity consumption, in Germany 71 per cent, in Spain 70 per cent, and so on. The study frames such similar top-line figures as demonstrating how “Ireland’s consumption is in line with FLAP [Frankfurt, London, Amsterdam, Paris] host countries and other European peers”. No it isn’t.

There is a big difference in the percentage breakdown within non-residential electricity consumption. The reason Ireland’s non-residential plus data centre electricity consumption is 2 per cent higher than Germany’s, for example – a country with a huge industrial sector – is because 22 per cent of our electricity is used by data centres. In Germany and the UK that’s 5 per cent, France 2 per cent, the Netherlands 6 per cent. This cannot be framed as “comparable”.

So why is the story Ireland tells itself about data centres so different from elsewhere? Even in the US, where environmental regulation and its enforcement are bulldozed by the Trump administration, communities across the political spectrum are mobilising against AI data centre buildouts. While Ireland’s data centres are still conventional cloud because we do not have the capacity to support hyperscale AI data centres, concerns about electricity prices, grid capacity, water usage, noise pollution and large industrial development are real, and surely shared.

Continue Reading Here - https://archive.ph/ocvvi

In the culture wars over data centres, there is no space for the middle ground. But a realistic examination of the benefits and costs is what we need.

Ireland’s data centre debate is the latest culture war, pitching environmentalists against those who refer to “Ireland Inc” when making their pro-business arguments. While seemingly endless growth in the tech sector has underpinned official support for the growth in data centres over the past decade – providing a trump card against objectors – the latest wobbles in employment in the sector and challenges in energy generation change the backdrop a bit. Ireland has bent over backwards to accommodate the multinationals over the years, but what happens now? The debate is born out of Ireland’s outsize dependence on Big Tech for jobs, many of them well paid, and particularly for corporate tax revenues. Companies like Apple, Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet – Google’s parent – have been significant employers and taxpayers. The green light for data centres has been seen as part of the overall package attracting them to Ireland – and means that the State has a high proportion of European capacity, adjusting for its relatively small size.

Data centres consume around 22 per cent of the State’s electricity and, at a time of tight supply, are under the microscope. Ireland urgently needs a better roadmap here. Data centres are part of this. But so too is increasing energy supply more rapidly, primarily from renewables but also vital gas-fired generation. As well as housing and public transport, part of the failure of vital infrastructure development in recent years has been in energy. Ireland did not plan for higher energy demand across the board as the population and economy grew and data centres landed. Data centres, as part of the infrastructure of the tech sector, play a role in economic development. Just how much is a key argument. The Government has oversold the story this week, based on a report it commissioned from KPMG, with Minister for Finance Simon Harris referring in the Dáil to estimates the report contained that across six sectors €100 billion in annual gross value added (GVA), 875,000 jobs and €14.6 billion in annual employment related taxes were “enabled” by data centres capacity located in Ireland. The key word here is “enabled”. The report also says that data centres “underpin” these economic impacts. There is some consultant-speak going on here. What this means is that the companies in these sectors use and rely on data centres. But the attribution of so many jobs directly to the presence of data centres in Ireland is a stretch too far. Using it weakens the Government’s argument by giving critics a target to attack. The real case for data centres is more nuanced, but to be credible, Ministers need to be making it. [ Ireland’s data centre strain a ‘cautionary tale’ for rest of world, UN saysOpens in new window ] The question that is impossible to answer is: what exactly is the link between the presence of the data centres and the creation of jobs and wider economic activity by Big Tech? The central argument in the KPMG report is that the ability of Big Tech companies locating here to be able to establish their own data centres “has strengthened Ireland’s ability in retaining and existing and attracting new FDI [foreign direct investment] from big players”. In KPMG’s view, it creates “a sticky investment footprint”. This is the essential point in the pro data centre narrative. But it also requires balancing with a look at the costs involved. Friends of the Earth, the environmental lobby, put the opposite case this week in a report arguing that data centre demand pushes up costs to electricity consumers. Due to the structure of the energy market, it argues that households pay more because the system is close to capacity more often and thus has to rely to a greater extent on more expensive energy produced via gas-fired stations. In turn, this pushes up carbon emissions. The arguments about the structure of the energy market are complex and just as a report commissioned by the Government is always likely to take one side of the case, one commissioned by an environmental lobby will also advocate the other. In the culture wars, there is no space for the middle ground. But the allocation of costs across the electricity system – and how much data centres pay for power and their wider obligations about location and the use of renewables – are valid issues. As is the extent to which Irish industrial and planning policy should accommodate them. You can’t do without data centres in a digital economy, especially in the era of AI. But the rules of the game are important. There are also questions here about balancing growth with climate targets. The data in the KPMG report shows how the centres owned by the big so-called hyperscalers – including Microsoft, Amazon, Meta and Google – are responsible for the bulk of electricity demand from Irish data centres. But the so-called “gigafactories” where massive computing power is based in data centres central to AI development, are in the US. This is a point of concern to the EU, which is aiming to develop five such facilities in the Europe at a cost of €20 billion to try to reduce tech reliance on Trump’s US. [ Data centres’ energy use being ‘managed appropriately’ by Government, Darragh O’Brien saysOpens in new window ] We are unlikely, given Ireland’s energy position, to see a gigafactory off the Naas Road any time soon. But the future of data centres will remain tied up with Ireland’s outsize dependence on US Big Tech and the trade off with the jobs and tax revenue this has created. This is the data centre trap and part of a live debate in policymaking circles about how to hold on to existing FDI and attract the next wave, at a time when the big firms are now being pushed to invest more in the US market. Those big companies will push for everything they can get. And Irish governments in the past have not been slow to meet their demands, at times excessively. These centres will remain part of economic investment in the AI era, but policy needs to recognise that Ireland has already contributed significantly in terms of international capacity. Ireland needs to decide its own priorities and central to this is a realistic analysis of likely energy supply in the years ahead.

Continue Reading Here - https://archive.ph/bmimf

cross-posted from: https://hilariouschaos.com/post/11329298

Author: Al Jazeera Staff
Published on: 05/06/2026 | 00:00:00

AI Summary:
Irland’s Prime Minister Micheal Martin confirmed the move on Friday. Both Ben-Gvir and Smotrich have repeatedly called for Israel to annex Palestinian territories. Martin also referenced the treatment of pro-Palestinian activists.

Original: 339 words
Summary: 31 words
Percent reduction: 90.86%

I'm a bot and I'm open source

New research by Friends of the Earth has found that soaring demand for data centres in Ireland has driven up energy prices, with Irish households paying the hidden cost.

WHAT DO DATA centres have to do with your electricity bill? About €1.4 billion worth, according to new research, which reveals how data centres have been driving up the wholesale price of electricity in Ireland through rising and constant demand on our grid.

The research — written by Dr Seán Fearon and commissioned by Friends of the Earth and Beyond Fossil Fuels — lays bare the impact of Ireland’s open-door policy on data centres in recent decades. Between 2015 and 2023, the data centre price effect meant households in Ireland paid an estimated €715 million extra for their electricity, or an average of €263 per household.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 marked the worst of these years. The new research, “The Cost of Data Centres: Modelling the Household Electricity Costs of Ireland’s Data Centre Sector”, shows that during this period, data centres inflated the cost of already rocketing wholesale electricity prices, increasing households’ bills by 8.5% in 2022 alone.

Between 2021 and 2023, data centres’ energy use exploded, growing from a 14% share of the island’s electricity system in 2021 to 21% in 2023.

The impact was hardest for households on lower incomes. Anyone who was on social welfare during these years paid an extra €209 between 2021 and 2023, the equivalent of a week’s income, to service this data centre price effect.

This, in effect, wrote off the social welfare increase that people received in 2022, a vital household income that should have gone towards food, bus fares, clothes and school supplies, but was instead drained from the Irish economy.

A blank cheque for data

For many, this was money that people simply didn’t have. In 2022, 236,140 households fell into arrears on their electricity bills, 11% of all customers. This number increased again in 2023, with the number of people who were in debt on their electricity bills by 90 days or more rising.

Had the Irish state reigned in the spiralling growth of the data centre industry during those years of intense price shocks, households’ bills would have been lower. The recent US-Israeli war against Iran has shown that such shocks and supply constraints are becoming a pattern.

According to the research, if the world faces another energy price shock over the next few years, and we keep allowing data centres to expand, households in Ireland will face an additional cost of €1.6 billion. This represents the loss of hundreds of millions of euros from household incomes across Ireland due to policies which prioritise one industry above all others.

These additional costs are a direct result of state policies that have facilitated data centres to swamp the Irish grid, forcing us onto expensive and volatile fossil gas imports to meet the energy demand of the country.

Because data centres use so much electricity, the total demand in the Irish electricity market exceeds the availability of lower-cost renewables more often. According to the report, this means that gas sets prices more often, driving up prices.

Greenwashing tech

But what about renewables? Big Tech and the government often position data centres and renewable energy as a “twin transition” needed to increase clean energy. This assumption was core to the State’s Large Energy Action Plan, which puts continued data centre expansion front and centre of its energy policy.

However, the State’s plan doesn’t add up for the rest of us. If we meet our most ambitious renewables targets, and we limit data centre demand, then our research shows that the data centre price effect on our bills goes down. But it doesn’t disappear.

Continue Reading Here - https://www.thejournal.ie/readme/data-centres-and-climate-7052694-May2026/

Costs here are 52pc greater than the average of our counterparts in the bloc – and data centres are being blamed

⬇️ Scroll down for the article ⬇️

Micheál Martin in fucking cruise control the last few years. Absolutely stealing a living with the rest of them. McEntee, Brown, O'Brien, O'Callaghan etc. - In case that wasn't clear or obvious enough. I don't think the others would be any better, but I do definitely think a big shake up is needed.

From this article:

Dublin MEP Lynn Boylan claimed the findings of the Household Energy Price Index for Europe show that the operation of a large number of data centres in this country were driving up prices for households.

And from the other day - https://feddit.uk/post/50044307

As the AI boom continues and the appetite for data centres continues to grow, energy minister Darragh O’Brien and enterprise minister Peter Burke are pushing forward with a Large Energy User Action Plan (Leap) to support sustainable post-2030 data-centre development.

Government urged to act after second report confirms Ireland has highest electricity prices in EU

The Government has been called on to take action after a second report confirmed that this country has the highest electricity prices in the European Union.

The Household Energy Price Index found that Dublin is the most expensive capital city in the EU for electricity.

The index is commissioned by the energy regulators in Austria and Hungary and covers 33 European countries, and includes non-EU members such as Britain and Switzerland.

The May edition of the index comes a month after the European statistics agency, Eurostat, found electricity prices in this country are the highest in Europe.

Dublin MEP Lynn Boylan claimed the findings of the Household Energy Price Index for Europe show that the operation of a large number of data centres in this country were driving up prices for households.

The report looks at the cost per kilowatt-hour (kWh) of electricity, which is a unit of energy measuring total consumption, equivalent to using 1,000 watts of power for one hour.

Ireland has the most expensive electricity of the EU27 with 38.52c per kWh.

This is compared with the EU average of 25.35c per kWh. This means Ireland is 52pc higher than the European average, according to the Household Energy Price Index.

Only Bern in Switzerland, outside the EU, was more expensive than Dublin.

In response to the report, the Department of Energy said Ireland’s long-standing reliance on fossil fuels for electricity generation has been a driver of higher energy costs. In addition, prices are influenced by our location as an isolated island, our low-density and widely dispersed population, and our small market scale.

It also said the latest Eurostat report stated that Ireland, in nominal terms, has the highest electricity prices in the second half of last year. However, when adjusted to take account of the “purchasing standard” – practical affordability that takes household income into consideration – Ireland was fifth highest, behind countries like Germany.

That Eurostat report, released last month, found that consumer electricity prices in Ireland are higher than in Germany and Belgium, which are the next most expensive.

Prices per kilowatt-hour in this country are more than 40pc above the EU average, the Eurostat figures show.

It was worked out that the average household in this country is paying around €480 a year more for their electricity compared with the EU average.

Ms Boylan criticised Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael for defending data centres, claiming they are driving up bills while ordinary families are pushed to the brink.

The Dublin MEP said: “Dublin is officially the most expensive city in the EU for household electricity.

“This is an appalling situation as Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael continue to sit on their hands while more than 300,000 households struggle to pay bills.”

The latest figures come after three energy firms have announced prices rises.

Continue Reading Here - https://www.independent.ie/business/money/government-urged-to-act-after-second-report-confirms-ireland-has-highest-electricity-prices-in-eu/a/155027266.html

The link to the game itself is at the bottom of the article.

I can't help thinking that the timing of telling everybody that Ireland is heavily reliant on US Big-Tech as they take over EU Presidency is not a coincidence.

Ireland has the potential to lose 94,000 jobs and €11 billion in gross value added (GVA) to the economy by 2030 if data centre development is constrained, while the country’s competitiveness as a digital hub would slip, new research has found. A new report from the Department of Enterprise and KPMG detailing the research is set to go to cabinet this week. It underscores the importance of data centres for the major multinationals headquartered in Ireland and found if this infrastructure was restricted, roughly €1.6 billion in employment related tax revenues would also be lost annually.

It said data centres were critical to Ireland’s digital sectors, supporting ICT, finance, health, transport, retail, and professional services and noted that up to €104 billion in GVA and 876,000 jobs could depend on data centre capacity located here. Data centres act as a magnet for foreign investment, with over €15 billion invested and a strong pipeline of future projects. However, without sufficient capacity for this infrastructure, the country will be at risk of slower productivity growth, job and investment displacement and weakened ability to attract high-tech foreign investment.

Electricity demand

A separate KPMG report from February cited Dublin as the host of Europe’s second largest data centre cluster, with a reported 1,150 megawatt (MW) in operation, just short of London. While this heaps additional pressure on the national grid, the government report stated that it’s important to recognise that countries such as Germany and the UK have large heavy-industry bases driving their electricity demand. Ireland’s industrial electricity use is concentrated in supporting our digital economy, this is our core industry, the report outlined.

Continue Reading HERE