Energy Policy: Motion [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-17
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Eoin Hayes (SD), Dublin Bay South

I welcome this timely motion and its call for a moratorium on data centre development and for electricity credits for families paid for by a tax on corporations. The other week, the energy Minister, as he did today, made the outrageous assertion that data centres are to Ireland what car factories are to Germany. It is a fallacious argument with no merit whatsoever. Instead of creating hundreds of thousands of high-paying jobs like the automotive industry, data centres create a tiny number, as Deputy Murphy outlined. Instead of developing products for export, data centres leach water and energy from all around them. Instead of providing economic activity, data centres merely host electronic transactions captured economically elsewhere. Data centres represent a severe economic threat to the State, and they are cannibalising the economy. Every kilowatt hour spent on a data centre is a kilowatt hour not available to a household or to a productive part of the economy like a pharmaceutical plant creating medicines, or a semiconductor factory. Data centres from one part of the economy, in big tech, are putting critical and important jobs in other productive sectors of the economy, even other foreign direct investment multinationals, at risk by inflating costs and threatening our ability to provide energy to our people and businesses.
I spoke to one businessman in my constituency this morning. He told me his electricity bill has surged 26% and it is now putting his entire business at risk. Data centres now guzzle nearly half of our renewable energy production. Meanwhile, we are, right now, decommissioning our only offshore wind farm, the greatest renewable energy resource that we have. This Government is fuelling its own climate and energy disaster and putting an existential economic, environmental and social risk at the heart of Government policymaking. That should change and it should especially change in light of the climate crisis, an energy crisis and an impending economic crisis. Anything less is negligence in the extreme.

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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