Bríd Smith criticises water bill thresholds and data centre use
Bríd Smith addressed a water regulation bill, arguing it offers only minimal compliance with EU directives and raises serious questions about thresholds, exemptions and monitoring. She urged the minister to clarify conflicts with OPLA and EPA advice and to explain how large industrial users and data centres will be regulated.
Scope and purpose
The speaker said any bill to regulate water is welcome, noting water is essential and that national water quality is grim. She argued the state is choosing the path of least resistance - the bare minimum to meet EU requirements - rather than robust protection for rivers, lakes and biodiversity.
Thresholds and exemptions
She highlighted the bill's thresholds - registration at 25 cubic metres and licensing at 2,000 cubic metres - and asked why volumes below those levels would be exempt from regulation. The speech cited estimates that the registration threshold equals the supply for about 42 households and said none of 21 water bottling plants would meet the licensing threshold. She referenced OPLA's advice that the thresholds are inconsistent with the EU directive and could make it impossible for the EPA to determine water body status, and questioned differing standards for existing and new licence holders and broad industry exemptions, naming Diageo and Glanbia as large extractors.
Data centre water use
She pressed the minister on whether the bill will regulate data centres, which she said can use substantial volumes of water. Citing reporting, she gave lower estimates of about half a million litres a day per centre and potential rises to 4.5–5 million litres a day, and cited examples including Facebook's County Meads site using 395 million litres in 2019 and planning expansion. She summarised planning figures for other facilities and said Irish Water's reply - that consumption may be 0.13% and giving figures for only 24 data centres - left many gaps, noting there are 70-plus data centres and questioning what happened to the other sites.
Calls for clarification and consequences
She asked the minister to explain the logic of protecting water bodies while apparently exempting significant industrial users, to resolve any conflict with OPLA and the EPA, and to set out how monitoring and licensing will prevent further deterioration in water quality. The speaker framed these technical points as matters of basic life necessities and public interest.
We publish thousands of recordings to make Irish politics transparent and resistant to manipulation. Spotted an error? Report it — together we are building a reliable archive of Irish politics.
Minister, it's really hard to think of anything as necessary to life as water and next to food and heat is absolutely truly essential and when the past government attempted to bring in water charges we were constantly told by various business interests that water would be the new oil in the coming years as the environment globally became threatened by climate and other crises and indeed when Fianna Fáil, Labour and Fianna Gael tried to ram through the water charges they were quick to tell us how precious a resource water is and that was their main justification in pushing water charges on ordinary people so while the name of this bill might seem a bit abstract it could hardly deal with anything more fundamental and more basic to life like a lot of bills that come before us the rationale is good the need for some regulation of water taken from our rivers and lakes and so on is very self-evident and we know that the national picture in terms of water quality is grim that EPA reports on our rivers and lakes are regularly desperate warnings about the state of our waters and the biodiversity that they support and we know that nitrogen is choking our coasts and our rivers so yes any bill which seeks to regulate and protect our water systems is welcome but here again I'm struck by a paradox when it comes to how the state regulates any and every sphere we are told this bill will give effect to several EU directives essentially we have to legislate but as we often do we are choosing with this bill the path of least resistance the minimal regulation the bare essential required to get us over the Brussels line and when you look at this bill and read over the very useful shannon debates a few questions jump out and would be good if the minister would clarify and try to clarify in answering the questions first of all as was highlighted in the shanna debate the thresholds for registration are 25 cubic meters and for licensing 2,000 cubic meters I'm at a loss to understand why anything below such large volumes of water are exempt from regulation it's at odds with the EU with the UK even with the north of this country this threshold was estimated to be the same as enough water that supplies 42 households the shanna debate heard that of the 21 water bottoming plants in the country none would pass this threshold how does that make any sense minister firstly have you resolved the conflict between this bill and the advice of the OPLA in relation to the thresholds and I note that this question has been asked of you multiple times on the volume of water that can be taken before there is a need to hold a license or even to be registered the OPLA suggested that it was inconsistent with the EU directive and that the EPA would find it impossible to determine if there was any determination in the status of water bodies if the threshold was below 25 cubic meters and secondly why are we enforcing different standards between existing license holders or extractors and new license holders and why do we have such large categories of exemptions from the legislation we know that the likes of Diageo and Glanbia and others take massive quantities of water from our bodies for water bodies but I'm unclear if this legislation essentially gives them a free pass again and that needs to be clarified if it does you might explain the logic behind regulating to protect our water bodies but ignoring vast sections of industries that are placing pressure and demand on them I want to talk now about data centres and again I want to ask the Minister if this bill will regulate the use by data centres of our water because we know that they do require massive amount of water as well as energy and while we wait to see if the lights will go out this winter because of our insane policy of supporting the unbridled proliferation of data centre building the other side of that coin is a massive use of water at these centres despite the green washing associated with them they are a massive draw on our water supplies and our water bodies and we seem to be largely ignorant about how much and what water is being used the average data centre uses at the lower estimate about half a million litres of water per day and that's according to figures gathered by the Sunday Business Post the figure has also in it the potential of that to rise to five million litres of water per day but these other figures Facebook's data centre in County Meads used 395 million litres of water in 2019 and that site is currently significantly expanding one data centre in Dublin filed planning applications that suggested it could use up to 4.5 million litres of water a day of Amazon's large network of data centres in Dublin permission sought for a centre in Dublin 17 stated that it could use 296,000 litres of water a day a facility on the Belgarde Road could use approximately 320,000 litres of water a day and one in Blanchardstown could use 330,000 litres of water a day and again according to the Sunday Business Post and yet when I asked Irish water about data centres their replies suggest that they don't know and that they don't think it's that important to monitor the volume and the quantity of water used officially they reported to me when asked and I quote while the overall percentage consumption of water may be low at 0.13% 810 millions of litres for 24 data centres i.e. an average of 33.75 million litres each a day that may baffle people but there are very obvious problems with the answer the figures are given to us for 24 data centres but we know there are 70 plus data centres in this state they've given no convincing reason or rationale what happened to the other 50 or so and worse they don't seem to have an issue with the proliferation or even a guess at what might happen when the next dozen or so hyperscale data centres are built and come on stream this is extraordinary and stands in stark conflict with the attitude to domestic and household use by ordinary people what's even more alarming is the full answer from Irish water and I quote data centres are one type of non-domestic customer and we don't analyse them uniquely in planning for future demand as they would represent a very small percentage of current and future non-domestic use data centres mainly use water only for staff facilities and cleaning some data centres do use water for cooling purposes but based on the Irish climate that would be for a short number of days per year perhaps minister someone should tell Irish water about climate change and the impact of global warming in this country it seems our state bodies responsible for this and those responsible for regulating have little interest in knowing how much and where our waters are used by industry and again we're forced to regulate we still seem keen to go ahead with light touch or no touch regulation and I'm afraid minister that this bill is another example of that no touch or light touch regulation but I would appreciate you attempting to answer the questions that were posed here. Boillon 2 1 and 3 2 2 the 3 3 4
Thank you for downloading 🙏
If you publish this material on social media, we would be very grateful if you tagged VideoParliament. It helps us reach more people and keep building a transparent archive of Irish politics.
