Irish Examiner view: Where is the public benefit to data centres?

Data centres now consume a staggering share of Ireland’s electricity.

For years, Ireland sold itself as the perfect home for the digital economy: Politically stable, highly connected, English-speaking, and business-friendly. The result is that global technology giants arrived in force, bringing jobs, investment, and prestige. But as Ireland’s data centre boom accelerates, a more uncomfortable question is emerging: Is the juice really worth the squeeze?

Data centres now consume a staggering share of Ireland’s electricity. The Commission for Regulation of Utilities says they accounted for more than one fifth of national demand in 2024, up from just 5% a decade ago. EirGrid forecasts that figure could rise beyond 30% within the next decade. In Dublin, where the grid is already under severe pressure, the situation is even more acute. Ordinary households are entitled to ask what exactly they are getting in return.

The tech industry argues that data centres are essential infrastructure for the modern economy. Cloud computing, AI, banking systems, communications, and streaming services all depend on them. That much is true. But there is a growing sense that Ireland has become disproportionately burdened by an industry whose benefits are increasingly abstract to everyday people, while its costs are becoming painfully real.

Those costs are financial, environmental, and infrastructural. Irish consumers already face some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Families struggling with mortgages, rents, insurance, and grocery bills are now being told they must also absorb the costs of upgrading an overstretched national grid. The more electricity demand rises, the more pressure there is on generation capacity, transmission infrastructure, and energy security.

Ultimately, consumers pay. That is the heart of the growing public resentment. People can accept paying for schools, hospitals and transport because they directly benefit society. But many struggle to understand why they should shoulder rising energy costs to facilitate enormous server farms owned by some of the wealthiest corporations on earth.

Then there is the environmental contradiction at the centre of all this. Ireland presents itself internationally as a climate-conscious nation committed to reducing emissions and expanding renewable energy. Yet the rapid expansion of data centres risks undermining those ambitions. Even with greater use of renewables, these facilities require colossal amounts of continuous electricity. Backup generators, grid reinforcement, and increased reliance on imported power all carry environmental consequences.

The State now finds itself in the peculiar position of trying simultaneously to decarbonise the economy while enabling one of the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in Europe. Regulators are belatedly responding. New proposals would require future data centres to provide their own generation or storage capacity and contribute electricity back into the grid. But this feels less like strategic planning and more like an emergency patch on a policy that was allowed to run too far, too fast. Ireland undoubtedly benefits from foreign direct investment. Few would argue otherwise. But there comes a point where economic policy must be judged not by headline investment figures, but by whether it improves the quality of life of ordinary citizens.

If the price of becoming Europe’s digital warehouse is higher bills, greater environmental strain and a permanently creaking electricity system, then the public is entitled to ask whether this is a fight worth defending at all.

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Autopsy system left to decay

Behind the clinical language of “post-mortem delays” and “pathology shortages” lies something far more human: Grieving families unable to bury loved ones, funerals postponed for days, sometimes weeks, while an overstretched coronial system creaks under pressure.

Warnings about this crisis are no longer isolated. Coroners, pathologists, and the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland have all sounded the alarm over severe staffing shortages, outdated structures, and mounting delays in the autopsy system. In some regions, hospitals have withdrawn from carrying out coroner-requested autopsies altogether as consultants cannot cope with the workload. For families, this is not an abstract policy debate. Delays in releasing remains prolong trauma at the worst possible moment.

Ireland rightly places enormous cultural importance on mourning rituals, funerals, and saying goodbye with dignity. Yet many families are now left in limbo because the State cannot provide a timely basic service after death. The irony is that coroners’ services are among the least politically contentious parts of public administration. Nobody questions their necessity. Nobody disputes the importance of establishing the cause of sudden or unexplained deaths. And yet the system has been allowed drift towards crisis through years of neglect. This cannot continue to be treated as a niche medical staffing issue. It is a question of public dignity.

A modern republic should not leave grieving families waiting on an overwhelmed pathology system operating, in the words of one coroner, on “a wing and a prayer”.

Peacekeepers come home

There were joyous scenes at Dublin Airport this week as Irish peacekeepers returned home from Lebanon to embraces, tears, and relieved families.

After six months serving with Unifil in one of the world’s most volatile regions, they deserved every welcome. Yet even amid the celebrations, there was an unavoidable bitterness.

The soldiers left behind communities now enduring some of the heaviest bombardments southern Lebanon has seen in years. Across towns and villages once patrolled by Irish troops, Israeli air strikes continue relentlessly, while evacuation orders force hundreds of thousands of civilians from their homes. Entire areas are being reduced to rubble by an occupying military operating inside a sovereign country.

Ireland has long taken pride in its peacekeeping tradition and its moral voice in international affairs. But increasingly there is a glaring disconnect between the courage shown by Irish soldiers on the ground and the timidity shown by political leaders at home. Too much has happened for too long. Expressions of “concern” are no longer enough while southern Lebanon is turned, village by village, into a moonscape.