Yesterday, Monday, 28 September, was the end of the latest submission period for the major Kilmeaden Data Centre development.
The planning file received a total of 484 submissions. Many of these come from residents and local politicians protesting against the development.
At 1.00pm on Monday, a large crowd gathered outside Waterford City and County Council’s Planning Office, located in the Menapia Building on the Mall.
Some protesters attended with gas masks and protective suits, there was a speaker playing the droning noise of a data centre into the street, and cars honked in support.
There was a strong Sinn Fein contingent to support the protestors with TD’s, Conor McGuinness and David Cullinane in attendance, along with councillors Catherine Burke and Joeanne Bailey.
The proposed multi-billion euro development includes 16 gas turbines, 48 apartments, a supermarket, a gym, a café, a health centre, a pharmacy and more.
One of the most frequent complaints is that this development will be spread across prime agricultural land which is being actively farmed at present, at a time of rising food prices and uncertainty in the global food chain.
“At what point does your country stop being a democracy?” asked Amanda Power, who spoke to The Munster Express at the protest. “I think it’s a question of whether the government and our local councils are willing to actually listen to the people in the area of whether they are just going to hand the land and the resources of this country over to big tech, big billionaires to profit off.
AN INDUSTRIAL SHADOW
Kilmeaden resident Jane O’Brien, also spoke to this newspaper during the protest. “If you have to have it [data centre] – put it into an industrial area,” suggested Ms O’Brien.
“We’ve grown up on that road all our lives. Our grandparents, our parents, they are elderly people in their 80’s and their houses are smack bang in the middle of this. That’s not fair to those people who have worked all their lives and paid those mortgages for those houses to raise their families there. To ask them to live out their last days under the shadow of that noise and that pollution,” she said.
“Data centres research is relatively new, but the proof is start to come out. The Maynooth report that Lynn Boylan commissioned shows that there is absolutely no benefit to communities, the water number was wrong, they are way above it. We can’t handle the power, we can’t handle the water.
“The data centres in this country take 23% of our electricity grid, they employ less than 0.1% of our workforce. It was 1,500 times more intensive to have a data centre worker than a health care worker or a social care job and 700 times more labour intensive that a teaching or construction job. It just doesn’t add up.”
Waterford Council is due to make a decision on the Kilmeaden development by 19 October, next.
AARON KENT Funded by the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme
