Electricity Regulation (Climate Action and Connection to Distribution and Transmission Systems) Bill 2025: Second Stage [Private Members]
Dail Éireann — 2026-09-24
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Paul Murphy (PBP), Dublin South-West

I thank Deputy Ahern and the Labour Party for bringing forward this Bill. I congratulate the Deputy on his first Bill . He will be happy to hear that, unlike the Government, we will be supporting it. We support what is an attempt to place some limits on data centres being automatically allowed to connect to the national electricity grid, regardless of any consideration of environmental and social costs. We think the time for moderate measures has passed. We should not be having any more data centres connecting to the grid. That is the position of Friends of the Earth, which was very well put forward at the AI committee this week. It has long been the position of People Before Profit. In 2021, former Deputy Bríd Smith brought forward our first Bill in respect of this matter. That Bill would have stopped any more data centres being built. At that stage, Ireland was already an absolute outlier in terms of the number of data centres we had and the percentage of our electricity being used. We are even worse now. Whenever the various data centres that are in the process of being built are completed, we will be even worse again.
It cannot be said too many times that data centres are already eating up about a quarter of our electricity supply nationally. People should know that data centres are using 80% of our electricity in Dublin. The new report by Dr. Seán Fearon, Dr. Patrick Bresnihan and Dr. Patrick Brodie should be read by everyone. Its title is very important. It is: How We All Pay for Big Tech: the Social, Economic and Environmental Costs of Data Centres in Ireland. Up until recently, this has been a debate where most people would have been critical of data centres. Most people do not agree with the Government's approach of giving big tech everything that it wants. However, we maybe have not been clear enough that there is a price to be paid by people as a consequence of the Government being completely captured by big tech.
Those costs are multiple and environmental. Since 2017, every bit of extra capacity added to the grid from renewable energy has been taken up by data centres. As a result, we are not getting any closer to moving to 100% renewables. I refer to the cost in terms of housing, the opportunity cost of 50,000 homes and the construction jobs that I will get onto maybe later. Instead of building data centres - most of the 19,000 jobs the Minister claimed were directly involved are construction jobs - those people could be involved in building homes. I refer also to: the cost in terms of connecting homes to the grid; the day-to-day financial costs, with hundreds of euro paid by every household in this country as a consequence of the data centres using up so much of our electricity and then pushing us up to the expensive electricity generation and into gas; the extra network charges; and the impact in regard to water. There is excellent stuff in the report to which I refer regarding our water usage. The costs are multiple, and what you see is the Government deciding that, right down the line, big tech will come before people.
What is in the report in respect of water is new. When controversy arose in the context of the hosepipe ban over the summer, the Government pointed to dated and limited Irish Water information to say, "No, this is tiny". However, what the report to which I refer provides in an estimate for the first time of overall water usage by data centres. Previous estimates have been limited to their metered water consumption, mainly for cooling purposes, but a much greater factor is the water used in producing electricity for them. The authors of the report estimate that this is equivalent to the water consumption of 340,600 homes, or 18.5% of Irish households. I have already made the point about the 50,000 homes that could have been built if we had not misallocated capital resources to data centres over the course of five years.
I want to talk a little about the KPMG report.
Over €110,000 was paid by the public to produce a junk science report on the supposed economic benefits of data centres. First drafts were not junk science enough, so the Department had to go back to KPMG and ask it to remove any reference to the extra costs paid for by the public, which was originally in the terms of reference. The Department asked the consultants not to include any reference to opportunity costs in housing or public transport. The email from the Department to KPMG could not have been clearer. It said:
... the exec summary needs to present a strong narrative that considers the full gamut of the economic analysis and provides the evidence base that supports the position that we should continue to further develop our data-centre landscape post-2030 in the context of our climate objectives.
Why are we paying for a report that the Government has already written the conclusions of? Why is the public paying for something like this? We are trying to have a debate in society about whether this is good and whether we should go further, and the Government is using public money to get a report where the outcome is predetermined not by the people who are paying for it, who are the public, but by the Government that is directing where the usage will be.
There is really useful stuff in the new report that exposes the ridiculous methodology used by the consultants. KPMG went over the top in meeting that request from the Government by producing a report in which it came up with a hyperinflated figure of 876,000 jobs in the country being dependent on data centres. The new report reveals that the methodology used to arrive at the figure was to include, for example, a surgeon working within 50 km of a data centre as one of those 876,000 workers. It did the same for a paediatrician or anyone working in a hospital that is located within 50 km of a data centre. Each of those jobs was counted as being dependent on data centres. Obviously, this is ridiculous. The Minister of State gave a figure of 19,000. When you dig down into the KPMG report, however, the figure for direct jobs is 3,300. That is it. The majority of the rest of the jobs are construction jobs, and those workers could instead be in the building of socially useful things like homes in order to address the housing crisis.
This all illustrates how captured by corporations, and big tech in particular, this Government is. It is willing to do anything big tech wants, and that is the role it is playing within the European Union. What is emerging about the Government's role in trying to strip away the right to privacy of not just Irish but European citizens at the behest of big tech is absolutely shocking. The new digital omnibus compromise proposal from the Irish Presidency proposes to end the right of European citizens to the privacy of their personal data in circumstances where that data is used for AI purposes. That is shocking. The Government does not have the courage to stand over that position, but it is very clear if you read the proposal from the Irish Presidency. It is a giveaway of personal data to big-tech corporations. That is the role the Government is playing within the European Union. It is driving a deregulation agenda with all these different omnibuses, but especially with the digital omnibus in this case in order to facilitate a blanket exemption from GDPR rules on the use of personal data for AI.
Then there is the AI summit happening as part of the European Council. The Government has said how great it is that it is doing this. The Minister of State, Deputy Smyth, told the AI committee yesterday that this "will be a timely opportunity for stakeholders from all walks of society and from across the globe to discuss and shape how we can collectively address these topical matters." People should go to the website of this AI summit. There is a huge list of speakers. There must be 50 of them. There is not a single critical voice. There is not a single trade unionist to represent the views of workers who are affected by AI and who might lose their jobs as a result of it. There is not a single climate scientist to talk about the impact of AI. There is not a single critical academic or independent civil society person. It is just big tech. Think of any big-tech company in the world and it is going to be there. Despite this, the Minister of State tried to claim that the summit is for stakeholders from all walks of society. When challenged, she said that of course it is industry-based. Thus, it is not from all across society, is it? The outcome is predetermined, just like the KPMG report. The AI summit is similarly about promoting AI in the interests of big tech.
This has been a bad week though for the Government on AI and data centres. It comes after the bad week the Government last week. People are waking up to the impact of data centres on electricity prices, energy usage and the degrading of culture, education and so on. That is happening across the world. In America, there is a powerful movement that is succeeding in stopping data centres being built in various states. Meanwhile, the Irish Government is saying that it will accept what is the toxic waste of the 21st century. However, people in this country are growing in confidence and saying that they will not take it. They will not take it in their communities and they do not agree that we should be using more than a quarter of our electricity for these big-tech data centres.

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Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2026-09-24/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-28T05:50:50+00:00
Sitting date: 2026-09-24