There’s a very famous scene in Monty Python’s Life of Brian where Reg, the leader of the revolutionary group, asks “What have the Romans ever done for us?”. If you haven’t seen it, look it up on YouTube because it’s very good.
I was put in mind of that sketch by a thought-provoking working paper published by Maynooth University’s Social Sciences Institute entitled How We All Pay for Big Tech: The Social, Economic, and Environmental Costs of Data Centres in Ireland.
However, this is more like a reverse of the Monty Python sketch, where instead of listing all the beneficial things that data centres have allegedly done for Ireland, the paper’s authors seek to repudiate them. A sort of “What would we have done without the data centres?”
As such, the paper offers an interesting counterpoint to the full-throated support and unhindered enablement of data centres by successive Irish governments without which, it’s safe to say, this country wouldn’t have achieved the feat of becoming an outlier in terms of data centres per head of population and data centre energy usage.
The paper’s authors (Seán Fearon, research fellow at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, Patrick Bresnihan, associate professor at Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute and Patrick Brodie, associate professor at University College Dublin) dismiss those who seek to argue this state of affairs brings unique economic advantages to the economy. They claim that “the economic contributions of data centres to the Irish economy are exaggerated, with headline figures failing to account for where value accrues and who benefits from it”.
The development of data centres in Ireland, they state, “represents a key means through which the “costs” of industrial development are socialised and its benefits privatised, especially in the context of energy transition”. Costs are not confined to energy and water use, or inflated household bills, “but the opportunity costs involved as alternative, socially necessary and climate resilient development pathways are foreclosed”.
They call for a moratorium on data centre expansion, stating that “economic development in Ireland should focus on meeting social and ecological need as a priority, rather than the needs of tech giants”.
The paper seeks to debunk several of the arguments advanced by advocates for more data centre expansion in Ireland. On the subject of jobs, for example, the authors argue that data centres provide little direct employment and the jobs they do create emit more emissions and are more energy intensive “than jobs across the economy by orders of magnitude”. They calculate that a full time job in a data centre is 880 times more CO2 intensive than a job in the health service, 590 times more than a job in education, and 400 times more than employment in the retail sector.
“Employment in the data centre sector is 776 times more power intensive than a job in education, 1,217 times more intensive than employment in the construction sector, and 1,529 times more electricity intensive than a job in the health, residential and social care sectors,” the paper adds.
On the subject of water usage, the authors claim the total data centre water footprint in Ireland in 2025 was equivalent to the total direct water consumption of 340,600 homes (or 18.5% of occupied dwellings in the state).
Those seeking to portray data centres as akin to national industrial sectors such as the German automotive industry, receive short shrift from the paper which notes the numbers employed in the former are around 400,000 compared to 3,300 in data centres. They point out that electricity use in the German automotive sector was 12.86TWh in 2024, about 3% of German national grid demand, and this scale is expected to decline in the coming years. Data centres in Ireland, by contrast, used 9.4TWh of electricity in 2025, or 23% of national grid demand.
With housing proving such a contentious issue for so many in the country, the paper highlights that “nearly 50,000 homes could have been built between 2019-2024 with the capital invested in data centres. This is the opportunity cost of misallocated construction industry capacity to build out the infrastructure of tech giants”.
One of the biggest concerns is the prospect of locking Ireland’s “energy and industrial development pathways into the infrastructural functions of some of the most powerful companies in the world”, transferring functions from the state to the tech sector, “a form of privatisation by stealth”.
The existing government policy of continued data centre growth locks Ireland into a dependent economic model “which is ecologically unsustainable and contradictory to long-term sustainable planning and development. Rather than securing Ireland’s economic future, current policies around data centre growth leave Ireland and our energy system irresponsibly exposed to geopolitical and economic downturns in the digital economy, the fortunes of US multinational companies, and foreign energy supply”.
That’s a very different reply from the ones we’ve grown accustomed to hearing when someone poses the question, “What have data centres ever done for us?”. And while it sounds extreme, if the paper is correct, then I think the US tech giants and their data centres may well have achieved what the Romans never managed: the conquest of Ireland.
Ltd
