On Saturday, people from all over Ireland marched through Dublin against data centres. The Irish Times called it the first national protest of its kind, and the march ran from the Garden of Remembrance to Leinster House.[1] It was part of almost 100 protests across 16 European countries, and Friends of the Earth Ireland, who organised the Dublin march, want a pause on new data centres.[2]
Even the headcount depends on who you read. The Irish Times reported hundreds of people.[1] TheJournal.ie reported thousands.[3] I’m not going to pick a number for you.
What struck me was how practical the complaints were. Rosi Leonard of Friends of the Earth Ireland pointed to a report estimating that the average household may have paid about €360 extra for electricity between 2015 and 2023 because of data centres. Residents from Naas, Co Kildare, who are fighting a proposed campus there, said data centres bring only short-term jobs while they’re being built. And it wasn’t one party’s march: representatives of the Social Democrats, the Greens and People Before Profit attended, as did Sinn Féin’s Eoin Ó Broin.[1]
Before the march, Amanda Power had travelled up from Kilmeaden in Waterford, where a data centre plan was refused planning permission a fortnight earlier. Her view is that “all the benefit is for Big Tech”, with very little coming back to the people who live nearby.[2]
The public mood looks similar. A recent Irish Times/Ipsos B&A poll found more than 60% of people wanted data centre building halted, at least for a while, and only 23% wanted more built.[4]
The scale is hard to ignore. In 2025, data centres used 23% of Ireland’s metered electricity, up from 5% in 2015, while every home in the country together used 28%.[5][6] So data centres now use almost as much as all households combined, and more than all the homes in towns and cities put together.[7] Forecasts reported by the Irish Times have them reaching a third of national electricity by the end of the decade.[5]
The people living next to it should get a real say in the deal.
The Labour Party tried to do something about it. In June, it brought a motion to the Dáil calling for a levy on data centres to recover the energy costs it says they add to household bills, along with a moratorium on new ones. Its energy spokesperson, Ciarán Ahern, argued that data centre demand means gas sets the wholesale price, which pushes bills up for everyone. The Government didn’t back the motion.[8]
The Government’s case is that data centres support jobs and tax: a KPMG report it published puts their direct contribution at about 19,500 jobs and €280 million in employment-related tax in 2024.[9] The energy regulator has also ruled that new data centres must bring their own generation or storage.[10]
The person I didn’t expect to agree is Dex Hunter-Torricke. He was director of communications at Elon Musk’s SpaceX and wrote speeches for Mark Zuckerberg. Earlier in the same week, he told the Irish Times that Ireland needs energy and infrastructure it controls, at a price people can afford.[11]
DIS is what I think
A march doesn’t change a policy, and I can’t prove where this ends up. What stays with me is who was saying it. A campaigner from Waterford and a former Musk and Zuckerberg insider, who agree on very little, said versions of the same thing in the same week. If a country is going to host the machinery the digital world runs on, the people living next to it should get a real say in the deal, and a real share of what it brings in.
My sources are presented below.