Energy Policy: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

They could be building houses. That is the other way this is affecting the housing crisis. There are more than 10,000 of these workers who are spending their time building data centres and they are purely temporary jobs. The KPMG report actually says these jobs will disappear once we have built all of the data centres. The workers could instead be building housing. What is the actual figure? How many people actually work in data centres? The Minister's own report, which is a report designed to support the case for data centres, says 3,300 direct jobs. The figure is 3,300, not 19,000, not 200,000 or the 1 million KPMG was trying to point towards. The figure is 3,300 direct jobs. Of course, every job is important. If any of these data centres had to shut down, we are in favour of a just transition but 3,300 jobs for an industry that is gobbling up one quarter of our electricity makes no sense.
The Minister is defending the indefensible. People across the world are waking up to the reality that this is the toxic waste of the 21st century. They use up all your electricity. They use up all your water. They restrict other jobs being created because of various industries not having access to electricity. They prevent the building of housing. They interfere with the delivery of public transport and they provide a tiny number of jobs. Nobody wants them. People in America are rising up against them and saying we do not want them but the Government approach is to say we will have this toxic waste nobody else wants. I will underline the point. When you are living in a country that has this very unusual, outsized nature of the data centres, people probably do not get just how unusual it is. Ireland is a massive outlier. There is no country like Ireland in terms of the percentage of electricity usage or any other metric you want to look at. We are ten times the European average.
The Government is on the run on this issue. An Coimisiún Pleanála's decision on the Mayo data centre is extremely significant. The turnout at the public meeting in Kildare a couple of weeks ago is extremely significant. People are waking up to the Government's agenda and the fact the Government is putting data centres before the needs of ordinary people in this country. I really predict this will be an enormous political issue over the course of the coming months. The Government's position is utterly untenable. It is why it makes all of the arguments it makes. Let us take up one of them as there are only ten seconds left. This idea that we should not worry as they are using 80% renewable energy is nonsense. The Minister knows it is nonsense. That is on an annualised basis over a whole number of years whereas the whole point is that data centre demand is pretty much continuous, it barely changes whereas renewables come and go. That is the whole point. It makes no sense to continue on this line. We need action on the cost-of-living crisis. We need people on the streets on Saturday.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-17/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:48+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-17