*John Gibbons
DATA CENTRES are using a fifth of the country’s electricity despite employing less than 2,000 people nationally with one of Ireland’s leading environmental journalists issuing a stark warning that lack of political understanding is accelerating “catastrophic changes”.
John Gibbons is among the guests in Ennis this weekend for the Ennis Book Club Festival. Based in Dublin, John has been writing and campaigning on environmental and climate issues for the last two decades.
He is the founder of the website Climatechange.ie and he also runs a blog at ThinkOrSwim.ie. He regularly appears on national broadcast media outlets, including RTÉ, Virgin TV, Today FM and NewsTalk. He has been a weekly environmental columnist on The Last Word on Today FM for the last five years.
Planning permission was granted to Art Data Centres Limited for the 200-megawatt data centre by the Clare County Council in 2022 and by An Bord Pleanála in April 2024. The case has been taken to the High Court by a group comprising of three individuals and two environmental organisations to try stop the development.
Gibbons is one of the country’s most respected environmental voices. He warned that data centres are not all they are piped up to be. “Data centres used three percent of our electricity ten years ago, last year it was twenty two percent, it is unsustainable. We are kowtowing to big companies, Ireland has more data centres per capita than any country in Europe. It is hindering our green transition, we’ve peaked at having forty percent of renewable energy on the grid but we can’t get past it because data centres are gobbling up the rest”.
He favours a moratorium on the building of data centres and said questions remain on what their function is. “Are they producing AI, do people know the consequences of AI, I think we need to take a breath, reduce, slow down and think carefully about it. On social media, we see X is out of control and is generating appalling content, criminal content and they are all powered by date centres, we need to slow down and regulators to catch up and properly regulate, if they are not prepared to regulate we can’t be a centre for companies behaving badly.
“We’re trying to decarbonise our society at time AI and data centres are trying to cobble up available energy, left to their own devices they would use all available electricity available in 2026 by the mid-century if we allow them to continue. They are not a big employer, about 1800 work in data centres nationally, a lot of them are security guards, Woodies DIY employ more than data centres in Ireland but the data centre industry are using a fifth of our electricity, we cannot be bullied into letting them do what they want”.
His first book ‘The Lie of the Land’ critiques the decisions that have put Ireland into a hugely vulnerable position ecologically. He will be discussing the book in conversation with environmental consultant, Féidhlim Harty at The Temple Gate Hotel at 14:00 on Friday.
It was a book that took eighteen months to write and edit but was effectively twenty years in the making, John explained. “The first thing is I try to challenge is the widely promoted idea that Ireland trades internationally on its green reputation, Bord Bia and Ministers put it to the forefront that it is a green and sustainable country, it is PR and facts don’t wear it out”.
Gibbons continued, “We have one of the most degraded countries anywhere, we have this perception on our green image and the reality trails far behind the image. Our uplands are mostly destroyed, we’ve very little natural spaces and in how we use the land, on average in Europe ten percent of the land is farmed organically but in 2020 in Ireland was barely two percent, the Greens while they were in Government helped to push that up to four percent but we’re among the lowest countries for organic farming in Europe”.
Surveys suggest the Irish public care about the environment but the reality is different, John flagged. “This isn’t borne out in how people vote or their own personal behaviour. We have a big disconnect and a long journey to go but a short time to do. We’ve had fifty days of continuous rain on the east cost and as I’m talking to you, it is the first time since Christmas that I’m out in my garden while it is isn’t raining. We’re seeing much more extreme weather patterns, I grew up on farm so I am more observant of the weather. Our climate today is unrecognisable compared to when people in their sixties were growing up.
Dominance of the livestock sector is not helping Irish agriculture, he maintained. “Our livestock system is uniquely emissions intensive and hard on landscape with water pollution, they are issues we don’t like to deal with in Ireland, people who speak up tend to be abused and vilified as hippy dippies, I deal in facts and evidence. Per capita our emissions in Ireland we’re the third highest in the EU, we have a huge problem with it, our CO2 emissions are the European average but we have massive methane emissions largely from our livestock sector which puts overall performance from Ireland into the red”.
Fines for failing to achieve climate goals will not be paid by those responsible but rather the ordinary tax payer, Gibbons cautioned.
Lack of political understanding is also accelerating “the catastrophic changes” that are on the cards such as the risk of the Thwaites Glacier collapsing into the South Atlantic “which will add 0.7m of global sea level rise so every coastline in the world will rise from this collapse. It is enough in Antartica to raise sea levels 70m which is taller than tallest building in Dublin, Liberty Hall. These are the catastrophic changes, we’re racing towards”.
Food security is a major vulnerability for Ireland, John warned. “We present as a major food exporter but we’re only exporting beef and dairy, you can’t feed a nation on two products, we’re exporting 90% of that but importing 80% of everything eaten in Ireland”.
One million tonnes of fruit and vegetables are imported to Ireland, “we could do this here but allowed our horticulture industry to collapse, our tillage industry has been outcompeted by dairy, tillage is highly productive and has lower emissions”. He added, “A key vulnerability for Ireland is food security, what we’re seeing is we import huge amounts of basic foods, much of which could be produced here, we’re importing cheaply from Southern Spain, Morocco, Greece and so on, the places are in turn being heavily damaged by extreme flooding and heatwaves, we’re seeing collapses in horticulture production which means food will get more expensive”.
Farmers need to be paid properly livestock needs to be “massively diversified,” Gibbons outlined. “It should form part of our system but no more than 25%, it is more 90% now. In order to feed livestock, we have to import 1m tonnes of chemical fertiliser, much of which comes from regimes like Russia who we would not like to be supporting”. He said the amount of cattle in Ireland cannot be sustained.
Scrapping the Department of Agriculture and Teagasc is recommended by the environmental journalist, he described both as “not fit for purpose”. He said, “I would replace them with a Department of Food Security and work towards the goal of food independence and change its objectives. The Department as it is mainly works with and for the livestock lobby, rather than reform it, scrap it and focus on food security”.
Climate has fallen off the agenda in terms of people’s priorities. “There was a loss of focus in the Irish media after 2010 on the climate but it came back with Greta Thunberg’s rise but we lost focus again with COVID crisis, the Greens had a very good election in 2020 and a very bad election in 2024, the Greens shouldn’t be solely for climate policies, it is far too important to be just for one party. It indicates a general loss of public focus on the emergency, between COVID and cost of living emergencies, I feel people felt overwhelmed and tuned out of climate issues but the climate continues to deteriorate, wishful thinking that it goes away is not a policy”.
He warned that the trajectory is of a global system breakdown “to crash the global economy far more severely than financial crash and cause widespread failure of nation states and breakdown of EU which will not survive, we’re likely to fall back into situation of warring states fighting for resources. While the going is good, we need to build out our energy and food independence so Ireland can provide reasonable level of energy for our population”.
“If I was a politician, the top of my list is to make that happen, all the other things would flow from that. If you can’t feed population and don’t have access to energy all bets are off, we’re in for a tough time, the future will be a lot more difficult than the immediate past, it will look like the deep past, the best thing we can do is to prepare, there is an old Irish saying, the day of the big wind is not the day to thatch your house, the time to make preparation is now”.
