Power grab: the hidden costs of Ireland’s datacentre boom

Datacentres are part of Ireland's vision of itself as a tech hub. There are now more than 80, using vast amounts of electricity. Have we entrusted our memories to a system that might destroy them?

In the doldrum days between Christmas and New Year, we take a family trip to see a datacentre. Over the past two decades, datacentres have become a common sight on the outskirts of Dublin and many other Irish cities and towns. Situated in industrial business parks, they are easy to miss. But these buildings are critical to the maintenance of contemporary life: inside their walls stand rows and rows of networked servers; inside the servers, terabytes of data flow.

It's a seven-minute drive from where we live now in Artane, Dublin, to the Clonshaugh datacentre, situated in a business park behind Northside shopping centre. Although we live close by, we haven't driven this way before, and our route takes us through a number of the local authority estates that my husband lived in as a boy. These estates are set on either side of a long, straight road pocked with chicanes to deter joyriders. Even though the housing development sprawls for miles on either side - with large wind-blasted green spaces in between - the houses huddle, squashed together. It looks as if someone has transplanted a warren of inner-city Victorian terraces to this desolate terrain.