An Irish Town Planner: Data Centres in Ireland: A Debate That Deserves Better

A personal discussion piece by Brendan Buck. It is not the opinion of BPS Planning.

I am a town planner, and if a developer or a community asked me to act for them on a data centre I would do so, and do it properly for either. My interest here is narrower than that. I would like the argument, when it is had, to be had fairly: without jibes, without insults and without misinformation from either side.

A word about Brexit

It is a peculiar feature of Irish public life that a planning dispute can go from the technical to the tribal in about a week. The latest turn came on 24 October, when The Journal reported on an interview with Ronan Kelly, chief executive of the lobby group Digital Infrastructure Ireland. Those who stop data centres, he suggested, resemble the crowds who cheered the Brexit vote. The opposition, he said, is fuelled by disinformation that has blown across from American politics. The AI industry, he told the paper, is like water: it will always find its way, and if Ireland's grid is the obstacle, it will simply flow to the next country.

There is something in this, and it deserves to be said first. Investment does move, and it moves quickly. Mr Kelly also concedes that his own sector has been too secretive and is preparing materials to explain itself to the communities beside which it builds. He says that 107 Irish data centres already use closed-loop cooling, which, if true, bears directly on the water question. It is his figure, and it would be worth having it tested independently.

The difficulty lies in the other claim. The Journal's report offers no evidence that foreign money is stirring up Irish objectors, and it records that some 300 people had objected to the Kilmeaden proposal a year earlier, which is hard to put down to a rumour from Virginia. A Brexit comparison is a handy thing to reach for, since it tells the audience what to think of people before it has heard a word they say. It does not help the industry, and it does nothing for the people who will live next door to its buildings.

What the larger argument is about

The debate here is not happening in a vacuum. It sits inside a much bigger argument about technology, power and who gets to decide, and Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor's work on what they call end times fascism, which I have read in detail, is one contribution to it. Their Guardian essay of September 2026 is adapted from their book of the same name. It is concerned with American politics and the tech billionaires. It does not mention Ireland, it touches on data centres only in passing, including the people who have defended their air and water against the sprawling ones, and it nowhere suggests that someone who supports a data centre is an extremist. Nobody should say so on its behalf.

What I take from it is a question that supporters and objectors can both ask, which is who gets the benefit and who is left with the bill. I want a better world, and in my book that means one in which people have a real say in what is built beside them, and in which the gains and the costs of progress are shared fairly.

The case for

The supporters have a real case, and it should be heard in full. The Government says that firms operating data centres here employ about 21,000 people directly, within an ICT sector of more than 180,000. Local authorities benefit as well. The Journal has estimated that councils collect around €62.5 million a year in commercial rates from data centres, about a fifth of South Dublin's rates income. The Maynooth geographer Patrick Bresnihan warned in the same piece that a deepening dependence on that money is risky, which is a fair thing to say and not an argument against the jobs.

Nor is it all bad news on the ground. In Tallaght, waste heat from an Amazon Web Services data centre now warms public buildings and a university, with affordable apartments to follow, through a not-for-profit utility owned by the council. The council estimates it saves more than 1,500 tonnes of carbon a year. Well designed, a nuisance can be turned into an asset.

The case against

Those who object have specific complaints, and the first is about the grid, where the figures are stark. The CSO says that data centres used 23 per cent of the country's metered electricity in 2025, up from 5 per cent in 2015. The SEAI, in Energy in Ireland 2026, puts the figure at 22.5 per cent and attributes 78 per cent of the net rise in electricity demand since 2015 to them, while recording that the European Commission puts data centres at roughly 3 per cent of demand across the Union. EirGrid says the greater Dublin region is now fully constrained for new connections, that the headroom is largely gone, and that a further six gigawatts of interest would double the peak on the system. One does not need an engineering degree to see why a householder, looking at a small island grid and a large industrial customer, begins to wonder about the bill.

Then there is what it feels like on the ground. Kildare County Council voted in September, by 22 to 11 with seven abstentions, against reviewing land zoned exclusively for data centres at Naas. Cllr Bill Clear, who had backed the zoning in 2021, said he had since learned that data centres were not all they were cracked up to be, having visited a site in Clondalkin where the noise and the smell had shocked him. Residents spoke of noise, air pollution and water.

In Kilmeaden, outside Waterford, more than 500 people objected to a campus covering more than a square kilometre. RTÉ reported three large ICT buildings, 16 gas turbines, and more than 300 people taking part in a slow-drive protest. The council refused permission earlier this month, citing traffic and the pressure on water and electricity. The developers had said that the scheme met regulatory guidelines and involved community consultation, and nothing in the reports suggests otherwise. But compliance is a low bar when you are a village of some 300 people being told, as one resident put it, to prepare for ten years of construction.

And in Killala, in Mayo, the council granted permission for a €1.5 billion scheme which An Coimisiún Pleanála then overturned on appeal, saying that the applicant had not shown consistency with the Climate Action Plan and had produced no evidence of a renewable power purchase agreement. The Irish Times found mixed feelings: relief in some quarters, and in another a Fine Gael councillor frustrated after more than seven years of work. One resident complained that developers put these things up "without explaining anything to the local people". That sentence could stand as a summary of most planning rows in the history of the State.

Elsewhere

None of this is peculiarly Irish. In Virginia, the Prince William Digital Gateway, a plan for 23 million square feet of data centres, ended in July after the courts found that the county had failed to follow its own public notice rules in rezoning the land. Whatever one thinks of the project, it died of a procedural failure, which is the most avoidable way for anything to die. In Tucson, the council rejected Project Blue unanimously in 2025, one member observing that giant corporations prefer to operate in the shadows. And across the 13 American states served by the PJM grid, the independent market monitor says data centres accounted for $6.3 billion of the $16.4 billion in the latest capacity auction charges, costs that find their way onto bills.

There are places that have found a middle road. Amsterdam paused new data centres in 2019 and then restarted growth in designated clusters, with caps on power and space. Singapore lifted its pause in 2022 but promised to be more selective in future.

What we have, and what we lack

Ireland is not starting from nothing, though it can sometimes look that way. The Government's 2022 statement on data centres still stands, and the regulator's December 2025 connection policy requires new data centres to bring matching generation or storage and to meet at least 80 per cent of their annual demand from additional Irish renewables. The same notice says that the regulator would prefer a State-led approach, with spatial planning and development targets. In January the Government published its Large Energy User Action Plan, a "plan-led" approach built around green energy parks beside renewable supply.

Last week, however, a Minister told the Dáil that none of the plan's 17 actions is yet complete. The plan names no sites, and the National Planning Statement that would set the criteria is promised only "before the end of this year". Nor does the plan prevent projects being proposed elsewhere. As far as can be found, there are no national planning guidelines dedicated to data centres, which leaves councils and An Coimisiún Pleanála to decide, case by case, what a plan ought to have settled beforehand. It is an old Irish habit to build the thing first and the policy afterwards.

A fair fight

There are two sides to this argument, and both are honest. The supporters see jobs, investment and the digital infrastructure that a modern economy needs. The objectors see a grid, a water supply and a landscape being committed to a single industry without their say. Neither side is helped by calling the other a conspiracy, a mob or a lobby.

The answer is not a ban, and it is not a free-for-all. It is what we have been slow to supply in so many areas, a system. That means national guidelines on siting, scale, noise, water and emissions, in place before the next application and not after it. It means development plans that say plainly where large energy users may go, tied to grid and renewable capacity, so that zoning land means what it says. It means binding standards on water use and heat reuse, with Tallaght as the benchmark. It means community benefit agreed at the start and not offered as an afterthought, and it means independent, published monitoring of power, water and noise once a facility is running.

With clear rules, developers get certainty, communities get a fair hearing, and the decisions can be argued on the facts. People rarely fight what they trust to have been well planned.

An Irish Town Planner

Wednesday, 28 October 2026

Data Centres in Ireland: A Debate That Deserves Better