Ireland’s water resources are being wantonly abused by data centres while a six-week “hosepipe ban” is being imposed on households across multiple counties during a heatwave.
The hosepipe ban comes alongside the establishment of a “tout hotline” by Uisce Éireann where people can report their neighbours for watering their plants. At the same time, data centres suck up hundreds of millions of litres of Irish water every day to generate profits for the likes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, in a clear expression of how the FFG regime in the Twenty Six Counties has subjugated the interests of the people of Ireland to the greed of big tech capitalists.
Over 130 data centres are currently operating across Ireland, with this number set to increase, along with their projected share of electricity usage from 22% in 2023 to over 30% of the Twenty Six Counties’ grid alone by 2030. The environmental impact of these centres – including drastically increased fossil fuel emissions and the overconsumption and pollution of water resources – is devastating. Uisce Éireann’s outdated statistic that data centres use 813 megalitres of water a year (or 0.13% of usage across the 26 Counties, based on 2021 figures) was widely circulated in commercial media, yet appears to be contradicted by Meta’s own published figures which indicate that a single data centre of theirs in Clonee used 928 megalitres of water alone in 2021.
At the same time, fat cat executives in Uisce Éireann are happy to award themselves with handsome bonuses while they preside over hundreds of millions of litres of water lost per day through leaks in the system, and pump raw sewage into Dublin Bay on near weekly basis.
The exploitation of our natural resources by business interests needs to end. We demand an immediate halt to the construction of environmentally destructive data centres, and the redistribution of resources and efforts towards a Thirty Two-County water and sewage infrastructure programme, to meet the needs of the people of Ireland, not the whims of big business.
