Lynn Boylan: Yes. A moratorium on data centres isn’t as risky as continuing to build them

We’re long past time for a moratorium on data centres.

There are certain things that should be a given in a decent civilised society. A roof over one’s head and affordable electricity are things that everyone should expect. However, the sheer scale of data centre development here is jeopardising both of those necessities.

An example from west Dublin neatly illustrates both. To facilitate new housing development, a substation was planned to enable connection to the grid. However, by the time the substation was built, the capacity was swamped by requests from data centres, leaving no room for housing developments to connect. That investment to the grid cost €100 million and benefited data centres disproportionately. But instead of the data centres footing the bill, households were on the hook for the cost of this infrastructure.

The industry makes technical arguments that centralised data centres are more efficient than servers distributed across office buildings, and often points out that if development does not happen here, it will simply happen elsewhere. At a time when nearly 6,000 children don’t have a place to call home, and more than 320,000 households can’t afford their energy bills, the Government’s industrial policy prioritises data centres’ needs, making it harder to address the housing crisis and harder to afford energy in the cost-of-living crisis. The question is not whether data centres have a role in our economy. It’s whether that role should come at the expense of non-negotiables.

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Often, the debate about whether we should have more data centres devolves into a debate about the importance of the tech sector in our economy. There is a false impression that limiting the number of........

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