Data Centre plan for landbanks is “like promising rural communities a ghost estate”
“We absolutely need to revive West Limerick and ensure thriving communities along the Shannon estuary but the plans that have been proposed are more akin to reviving its coal mines than they are tackling our 21st century problems.”
Responding to comments by Fine Gael Cllr. John Sheehan that “Recently data centres have been put into (other) brownfield sites. There is one in north Yorkshire (in England) where they decommissioned a power station and it became a data centre. The same is happening in Spain. But there is no mention of what is going to happen here.”
Ruairí Fahy, People Before Profit candidate for Limerick Mayor, said, “We absolutely need to revive West Limerick and ensure thriving communities along the Shannon estuary but the plans that have been proposed are more akin to reviving its coal mines than they are tackling our 21st century problems. With the obvious bubble that’s currently taking place in the tech industry around AI, offering West Limerick a data centre is like promising rural communities a ghost estate.”
“The idea that putting in a data centre on the site of a former factory is either ignorance of what a data centre actually is, how few people it employs and how much electricity and water it consumes or is a result of lobbyists whispering into the ears of elected representatives.
“By building a data centre you're closing off the possibility of building other facilities that can actually tackle problems around housing, clean air and a transition away from fossil fuels.
“The national development plan is pushing more and more people into the city instead of ensuring a good quality of life out the county but continuing with Fine Gael’s development policies that are designed to attract multinationals by making us the best little country to extract from isn’t going to deliver that it will just mean industries that produce few jobs and hollowed out communities”
“We need to focus on building out the factories and industries that reduce our energy use, not increase it. This means building out factories to produce heat pumps, insulation and modules for rapid build homes.
“It means that instead of courting international finance to build offshore floating wind turbines that have a much higher cost than alternatives and will drive up energy costs for homes we look at publicly owned energy generation to ensure communities that host it benefit from it.
“Finally it means that instead of the plans to build out ammonia and fertiliser plans, as are part of the current estuary plans we need to look at climate neutral or climate positive farming practices that don’t force farmers on to the treadmill of constant debt and land acquisition to keep their heads above water.”
