Writer Sally Rooney wins: Mayo data center loses permit

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Here’s a rare piece of heartening tech news to buoy you toward the weekend:

A West of Ireland data center objected to by novelist Sally Rooney has just had its planning permission overturned on the grounds that it breaches Irish national climate policy.

The facility, which was granted planning permission last year despite pushback from local residents, was set to be built in Killala, Co Mayo by Mayo Data Hub Ltd, part of US firm Avaio Digital.

Rooney—the author and Mayo native whose novels have become a cultural phenomenon over the past decade— lodged an objection to the proposed data center back in January, writing to Mayo County Council that permission for the facility would increase carbon emissions and create a risk of blackouts, and that “climate change represents an immediate and unprecedented threat to our way of life here in Mayo and to the future of human life around the world.”

In November 2024, Rooney published a viral cri de coeur in the Irish Times that opened with a grim assertion: “If fossil fuels keep burning at present rates, we are headed for apocalyptic civilizational collapse.”

Because the current Irish government has aggressively rebranded Ireland as “the Silicon Valley of Europe” (shudder, gag, weep), data centers now account for almost a quarter of the electricity consumed in the country, up from just 5 percent in 2015. Last December, the Irish State moved to lift an effective moratorium on new data centre connections to the electricity grid, which had been in place since 2021.

Rooney is no stranger to political activism, having emerged in recent years as one of the literary world’s most vocal advocates for Palestinian rights . In August of last year, she risked arrest by vowing to support Palestine Action despite the direct action group being proscribed as a terrorist organization in the UK.

Let’s hope that Rooney’s successful effort encourages other prominent authors to speak out against the plague of data centers sweeping the land. As the ancient Irish saying goes, “the only thing better than firebombing a data center is preventing one from being built in the first place.”