Lynn Boylan (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Go raibh maith agat, a Chathaoirligh, and I welcome the Minister of State. I am here to raise the deeply concerning proliferation of data centres in the country. It seems they are now a new frontier for extraction where our cool climate and windy hillsides are ripe for the taking. We know that data centres are popping up all over the country and with them comes windfarms and fossil fuel energy generators. Despite the best efforts of tech giants to greenwash the impact they are having, the figures do not lie. The surge in Irish data centres comes with a massive carbon footprint. They pretend that big tech is a clean industry but it requires a huge amount of energy to power the servers and fans to suck in cool air. Each video on file on the Internet has to be stored in these data centres.

By 2027 data centres will consume 31% of Ireland's electricity. Across Europe while energy use is decreasing, in Ireland we are an anomaly because it is increasing. That has nothing to do with our household or population growth. It is purely down to the rise in the number of data centres. They will require 12.5 TW of electricity above what is being provided. That is enough power for 24 million homes. These data centres should be treated like the carbon intensive industry that they are. It seems there is a greenwashing campaign in full spin because we hear that data centres will be 100% powered by renewables. However, the amount of energy projected to come from their windfarms is far outstripped by the demand from these data centres.On top of that, each megawatt of wind capacity must be backed up with energy generated from fossil fuels. This is not to mention the fallout of the biodiversity disaster in the Meenbog wind farm, which has a contract with Amazon. While pilot projects in which waste energy is sold to heat homes or public buildings are welcome, they barely put a dent in emissions.

When we hear talk of the cloud, it is as though it has no material impact but the truth is it is bad for climate and to date, the Government has given the industry a free pass while the public is left to carry the bulk of the massive cost for the infrastructure required to run these data centres. The Irish Academy of Engineering estimates that we will need €9 billion of new infrastructure. It seems the Government strategy has been so successful in attracting data centres that we now have an enormous and disproportionate amount of western Europe's data infrastructure, and with that comes these colossal CO2 emissions.

This begs the question as to what we are getting out of this deal. Will we get jobs? Not really, as after the short-term jobs used in construction, data centres do not require very many people to run them. I read the Government strategy and the headline benefit in the executive summary indicates that this will raise the international visibility of Ireland. It seems that what we are getting in return for hosting these data centres is some good public relations. I am sure the Tánaiste's spin doctor could come up with a bigger and cheaper way to do this with less of an impact on climate change.

Billions of euro in taxpayers' money are being siphoned off to benefit these big technological companies for what appears to be no tangible benefit but rather a massive environmental cost. Communities, non-governmental organisations and individuals have tried to stand up against these tech giants, as we have seen with the Athenry case, and they demonstrated the faults in the environmental impact assessment. Apart from what we are getting out of this deal, will the Government commit to reviewing the environmental and climate impact of the policies we have that support the proliferation of these data centres?