Energy Policy: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Sinéad Gibney (SD), Dublin Rathdown

I thank Deputy Boyd Barrett and colleagues for bringing forward this motion. The Social Democrats are very proud to support it.
I want to make three key points in my comments. First, data centres are affecting our communities and we have a duty and responsibility as representatives to simply reset the scales. We have all seen research that shows the very people who contact us worried about how to heat their homes are facing higher prices due to the sheer volume of data centres in Ireland. When an industry that has not been kept in check has this kind of impact on ordinary people's lives, it is our job as policymakers to step in and do something about it. We know they provide little direct employment. We know they are part of an immensely profitable and influential sector that can afford to contribute a small portion of those immense profits to mitigate these adverse impacts on ordinary citizens. We know that the public see an unfair system where they are expected to scrape by with skyrocketing electricity costs while the industry that uses 23% of our national electricity, and which is forecast to rise to one third in the next four years, benefits from a system of mates rates. Ní féidir linn glacadh leis go mbeidh ar an ngnáthdhuine fulaingt le costais fuinnimh, costais atá á n-ardú ag na hionaid seo, gan rud éigin a dhéanamh faoi.
We need a genuinely honest conversation on data centres. We see it time and again when reasonable concerns and issues are raised that there is no common sense behind the assertion put forward by both Government and the tech sector that if you do not support unrestricted data centre growth, that means you do not want anyone to have internet, online archives or technology. There is a difference between having a coffee in the morning and having 50 coffees. There is a difference between having some data centres and having so many that they threaten our grid, disrupt our communities and make us a "cautionary tale" according to the United Nations. It is also not acceptable to fudge the numbers around the number of jobs based in data centres to suit their narrative, throwing out reports with outlandish employment claims, like figures of 20,000, that do not acknowledge the majority of those are temporary roles for the people building the data centres. This undermines trust and, frankly, indicates the cold hard facts do not justify data centres being allowed to operate at the scale they do in Ireland.
My final point is that data centres are a tool that have been managed poorly. Many useful or productive things may require data centres but the narrative we need to change is that because a good and useful thing may need a data centre that all data centres are then good and useful. This fable means they get lower electricity rates, the same grade connection priority as a hospital or school, they get to emit noise at night which is waking up people in nearby homes, and this happens regardless of whether they are storing a university repository or powering the generation of AI slop. We have a responsibility to balance what they want and what is good for our society and that is a responsibility that has been neglected for far too long.

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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