IN THE DARK OVER €1.2BN DATA FARM
Locals ask who’s behind plans for energy-guzzling facility on 126 acres of idyllic farmland
AS a child growing up on the edge of Ennis in Co. Clare, we knew Liddy’s farm as a wonderful place. It had a pond near the farm gate, and you could take a small boat across it.
Often, we didn’t ask permission, but the Liddys were kind people who didn’t mind and it was a unique place; no other farm around had anything like it.
Now the two-storey farmhouse, its six sheds and its pond, are to be bulldozed, along with more than 120 acres of farmland, to make way for a €1.2billion data centre, the largest in the west of Ireland.
The plan, still being considered by Clare County Council, is pitting environmentalists and neighbours on one side and council officials and the data centre’s owners on the other.
Located on the eastern outskirts of Ennis at Junction 13 on the M18 connecting Galway to Limerick, the centre on 126 acres is expected to create 1,000 construction jobs over five years, as well as 200 data centre roles and 150 indirect jobs.
‘Huge amount of fossil fuels being used’
With electricity prices soaring to their highest-ever level this year and the national grid creaking at the edge of what it can endure – with eight serious alerts about a possible blackout in 2021 alone – data centres’ huge electricity needs and their vast carbon footprint have become the subjects of a national debate.
In late September, a Maynooth University academic, Dr Patrick Bresnihan, told an Oireachtas committee that if all proposed data centres were to get planning approval, they would drain 70% of Irish electricity by 2030.
The Government disputes his figures, but the vast electrical drainage of data centres has been well documented in other countries. The growth of Irish data centres comes at a time when some of Ireland’s largest electrical plants – such as the coal-burning plant in Moneypoint in south Clare and the Tarbet oil-burning plant in north Kerry – will have to close by 2026 to comply with EU carbon reduction targets.
The Government hopes to replace that with renewable energy and natural gas, but there will be a lag of several years before the plants can be replaced. Yet, despite the debate swirling around the Ennis project, nobody seems to know who is behind it.
It’s hard to find out because the data centre proposal is being put forward by a company called Art Data Centres Ltd.
Art Data Centres’ sole director is Deborah Delaney of Avonlea, Demesne, Lucan Co. Dublin, and the company secretary is Brendan Delaney, of the same address.
Ms Delaney has been director of 6,570 other Irish companies, 3,004 of which are now closed, and she and Mr Delaney are listed online as having a company formation business.
The Delaneys, who are perfectly entitled to run a directorship business, have not yet returned a request for comment.
Art Data Centres Ltd has applied to the council for six two-storey data centre buildings up to 19m in height, as well as a two-storey ‘vertical farm’ for more data storage.
The data centre would take over five years to build, and, subject to Clare County Council planning approval, construction would begin in June 2023.
The planning documents submitted to the council don’t reveal the tech or data company behind the project – they are submitted on farmer Tony Liddy’s behalf by Cunnane Stratton Reynolds, a planning specialist company in Molesworth Place, Dublin 2.
Still, the project has impressed Clare councillors, who have been doing rezoning headstands in an effort to get planning approval for the data centre, including varying their County Development Plan to rezone the 126-acre farm as an enterprise zone that will be data centre-specific.
Ahead of the rezoning, the council’s director of economic development, Liam Conneally, described the project as ‘a game-changer’ for Ennis and for Clare that would create 1,000 construction jobs over five years and bring 200 data centre jobs and 150 indirect jobs.
Those employment figures are very much disputed by Extinction Rebellion, Futureproof Clare and the Clare Environmental Network, three of the environmental groups fighting to stop the data centre.
Melina Sharp, of Futureproof Clare, stood outside the farm with a protest sign last week as she told the Irish Daily Mail that the data centre will require huge amounts of fossil fuels.
‘It will require 80 megawatts from the national grid and 120 megawatts from a gas-fired generator, along with diesel generators used as a backup in case there is a blackout, so we have a huge amount of fossil fuels being used as a time when we are supposed to be reducing our carbon emissions,’ she said.
Ms Sharp said that there wasn’t much point in Ireland banning the highly controversial practice of fracking for natural gas if the country is simply going to import huge amounts of fracked natural gas from other countries to use on data centres.
She said that, despite the opposition, her group doesn’t know who is behind the project.
‘Its director is the director of thousands of other companies, so who is really behind this?’ Ms Sharp asked.
Local Fine Gael councillor Mary Howard is still unsure about the science behind the project but is broadly in favour – if it doesn’t drain too much electricity or water.
‘Every photo I take on the phone, every text I send - it all has to be stored somewhere, that’s the reality,’ she said.
Cllr Howard continued: ‘We have been told that modern data centres do not drain as much electricity and water but that really is a matter for the planning department to consider .
‘We need to store data some place. They reckon that building the data centre will attract a huge amount of jobs and well-paid jobs afterwards and that would be an asset to any community.’
Cllr Howard said that she was unaware that the sole director of Art Data Centres has also been director of more than 6,500 companies. ‘That’s something that really should be looked at,’ she said.
‘Centre will attract a huge number of jobs’