Data centres are not on the menu for the customers who still like to eat dinner in the middle of the day in The Village Inn, Killala, Co Mayo.
A huddle of them sitting at the bar when The Irish Times visited recently are more concerned about a couple of Irish-bred horses that had romped home at a race in Wolverhampton a few days earlier.
However, Marie Sweeney, who has run the pub for the last 32 years with her husband Aidan, is happy to talk about An Coimisiún Pleanála’s refusal of the development of a data centre near the village.
Mayo Data Hub Ltd, a subsidiary of US infrastructure and data centre firm Avaio Digital, had originally received planning permission from Mayo County Council last year for the proposed €1.5 billion project at the Killala Business Park, once the location of the Asahi factory.
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However, this decision was appealed to An Coimisiún Pleanála, which ruled last month that “the applicant has failed to demonstrate that the proposed development would be in accordance with the overarching objectives of the Climate Action Plan 2025″.
[ Ireland can’t be a dumping ground for data centres other countries don’t wantOpens in new window ]
The ruling also stated there was a lack of evidence that the project had any corporate power purchase agreement with a renewable energy supplier.
The increase in the number of data centres has drawn criticism in light of how much power they consume and the strain they are putting on the national energy grid. Data centres accounted for almost a quarter of the electricity consumed in Ireland last year.
Residents in Co Kildare are fighting plans to zone land for a data centre at Jigginstown near Naas, and protests were held last month outside Kildare County Council offices.
“It is not central to my thoughts and I don’t know a lot about it, just what we heard in the media,” says local Mayo woman Marie Sweeney of plans for the Killala data centre being refused.
“The data centre is just another plan that went in and has been refused. We’ve been there before with plans going in and being refused, or not coming to anything.”
Author and Mayo resident Sally Rooney was among those who had objected to planning permission. Rooney argued it would be a wasteful use of electricity that would require burning of fossil fuels to generate, and that it was not an acceptable development in a climate crisis.
It is more than a decade since then taoiseach Enda Kenny announced that US-backed Mayo Renewable Power would develop a biomass plant to generate electricity on the site of the business park with an investment of €180 million and the creation of 350 jobs.
The proposed factory lies half-built to this day, with the development stalled due to funding shortages and regulatory problems.
“Sometimes we don’t miss what we don’t have,” says Sweeney. “So it is no surprise that I haven’t heard anyone mention the data centre refusal.”
The potential business it might have brought is also on her mind.
“It might have brought some employment to the area, but people are saying there wasn’t enough energy for it,” she says.
“I don’t know if AI is the way we should be going ... but I wonder if in time, it is going to be trouble.”
Indeed, she is not overly concerned about the possible loss of long-term employment due to the thumbs-down issued by the planning appeals board.
[ Podcast: Is it time to rein in the data centre boom?Opens in new window ]
“Killala is very quiet today, but we are very busy in the summertime and the weekends hold their own. We do have a lot of employment around, like Coca-Cola, Hollister and Baxter in Ballina [13km away],” she says.
“There is very little unemployment here, with a lot of locals commuting to Ballina, Sligo and Castlebar. My own son commutes to Sligo.”
Down the hill on Market Street, Uinsionn MacCraith has just completed a routine appointment with his GP. He is an Irish scholar and author who lives in the village of Glenamoy, some 30km farther northwest in remote Erris.
MacCraith says he was “absolutely delighted” the data centre was refused.
“Developers are just putting these data centres up here, there, and everywhere, without explaining anything to the local people or letting them know what they are doing,” he says.
“What it is costing the country as far as electricity is concerned is absolutely ridiculous. The price of energy is going up all the time, and yet the companies are making big money and the data centres are getting electricity for way lower prices than we ordinary people.”
Co Mayo Aontú TD Paul Lawless welcomed the refusal, noting that Ireland has become “Europe’s data centre”.
But local Fine Gael councillor Jarlath Munnelly is frustrated about the decision to refuse.
“This company has been working for in excess of seven years on this proposal, and they submitted a planning application to Mayo County Council, to which there were no local objections. They’ve met with all the regulatory bodies, and then for the project to be refused on appeal – it’s hard to understand,” he says.
Munnelly is concerned about how it has become “increasingly difficult” for businesses to invest in Co Mayo and is worried about “what type of enterprise we will ever be able to attract” to the locality
“As a country, if we actually got serious about offshore renewables, we can generate excess energy in a manner that I believe would be acceptable to communities,” he says.
