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.”
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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.
Darragh O'Brien on Ireland's missed climate targets, new help to buy EVs and Fianna Fáil's leadership
Pat joins Hugh after interviewing Fianna Fáil's Darragh O'Brien about major issues related to his twin ministries, Transport and Climate, Energy and the Environment. They listen back to the interview and discuss what O'Brien had to say about a new scrappage scheme to encourage the purchase of EVs, Ireland's certain failure to hit its legally-binding emissions targets in 2030 and the financial cost to the state of that failure.They also discuss data centres and the future of Fianna Fail's leadership after a disappointing showing in the recent byelections.
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.
Ireland is not producing magic energy. We have not found some secret sauce to garnish this scale of development and its energy demands that no one else has the recipe to. Government cannot continue to tell just one side of the story in a manner tantamount to lobbying for Big Tech and the data centre industry. Asking everyone to park their common sense about consequences is a stance that lacks credibility. In fact, it feels very much like other fantasies that are nice to believe – until reality hits.
