Wind- blown clouds

We are driving through the borderlands between counties Donegal and Tyrone, in the north- west of Ireland, on our way to the Meenbog wind farm (Figure 4.1). This was the site of a 2020 peatslide, reportedly caused by the construction of a ‘floating’ access road for the installation and maintenance of turbines. A video of the peatslide posted on Twitter by a passing hillwalker shows trees and boulders floating on rafts of peat drifting down the hillside. Eighteen months earlier, Amazon Web Services (AWS) had announced that it was entering into a corporate power purchase agreement (CPPA) with the facility's owner. This was proudly heralded in the media as a clear sign of the tech multinational's commitment to climate action.

To get to Meenbog, we follow the Barnesmore Gap. Today, what appears as a passageway for infrastructure across the rugged Bluestack Mountains was carved by glaciers about 13,000 years ago. Sphagnum moss, the ‘bog-builder’, along with the wet climate, has decomposed and created uneven layers of peat over the bedrock. It is this soil formation that characterises the bogs as a resource, beginning with its recognition as a fuel source after the clearance of the woodlands. Large swathes of blanket bogs in Ireland are still beholden to ancient, commons- based turbary rights of local residents, or the right to use certain plots of land for domestic turf- cutting. Driving across the western countryside, we can see the extent of this still- lively culture of energy. Veins of drainage ditches, excavation lines, and stacks of dried peat made by turf- cutters are visible for miles across many of these landscapes, with typically few permanent dwellings. This semi- subsistence energy economy takes place alongside wind farms, sprawling evergreen plantations, and industrial- scale cutaway sites.

Why are there so many data centres in Ireland?

If you read the news, you will probably know that data centres use a lot of resources, especially energy and water. These warehouses of the ‘cloud’, which house rows of servers processing global internet activity, have come to the forefront of contemporary discourses surrounding the sustainability of the tech industry. The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) especially has caused a proliferation of debate about the astronomical energy usage of large- scale computing. The expansion of the tech industry's server requirements shows no signs of slowing. What began a few years ago as a relatively minor criticism of the tech industry from the likes of Greenpeace International (2017) has now become central to the ‘sustainable’ strategies and policy considerations of all major tech companies and states as they double- down on the highly speculative promises of generative AI. While some commentators fret over the existential threat of sentient robots, the far more material and present threat of AI's resource requirements is poised to derail any slim hopes of decarbonisation and a liveable planet for the majority. Channelling the accelerationist attitudes of Silicon Valley, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt casually dropped in 2024 that the energy demand for AI was infinite and, since we were never going to meet our climate goals anyway, we may as well bet on building AI to solve the problem (Woodcock 2024). This AI will require the construction of thousands of data centres to accommodate expanding computational needs.

This is not the tech- fantasy hubris of one man, or even a few powerful tech companies – it is the beating heart of capitalist eco- modernity.

Commercialising the carbon cycle (through technoscience)

We arrive in Abbeyleix, a small town in County Laois, in winter 2023. We are here to attend a conference, entitled ‘Future of Ireland's Peatlands: Science, Engineering & a Just Transition’, which promises to connect ‘researchers, community groups, industry, state and semi- state agencies’ to discuss ‘how current and upcoming research can best address challenges faced by the peat sector’. Convened by iCRAG, the Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centre in Applied Geosciences, the conference features speakers from multiple universities and research hubs, primarily drawn from the sciences as well as industry groups interested in the value and potential of peatlands for future enterprise.

Across a packed day of panel discussions and keynotes, and a poster display of maps, images, charts, statistics, and figures, all branded with public bodies such as iCRAG, SFI, National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS), and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) alongside private sector organisations, we are introduced to multiple digitally enabled regimes of dissecting peatlands across Ireland. Aerial radiometry, satellite imaging, environmental sensing, drone surveillance, GIS mapping, machine- learning, among other digital, technological innovations, are allowing scientists to better understand the unique ecologies and resources offered by peatlands, enabling policy makers and landowners to better harness them towards climate action. However, that action is buried in arcane and technocratic language. We hear terms such as ‘ecosystem services’, ‘nature- based solutions’, ‘natural capital’, ‘emissions trading’ thrown around by scientists in coldly neutral or even enthusiastic terms, with minimal explanation or reflection on why these images and graphs translate to these terms of interpretation.

Peat- fired progress

There are no complete reproductions of Seán Keating's mural exhibited as part of the Irish Pavilion at the World Fair in New York City in 1939. Photos exist, however, documenting the mural being painted on a series of panels joined to a large wooden structure (Figure 2.1). The painters working in the foreground are the same size as the figures they are depicting. They wear similar clothes and adopt similar postures because the figures in the mural are artists too, as well as engineers and scientists. The distinction between the mural and real life is blurred. This probably would have pleased Séan Keating whose realist, romantic paintings had been part of the making of the new Irish state since the War of Independence.

The mural was a showcase of how far Ireland had come in 20 years – not just from former colony to sovereign nation, but a country that was at the forefront of modern technology and design. At the heart of this vision of modern Ireland was the Ardnacrusha hydroelectric dam. Keating was intimate with this totemic energy infrastructure having spent much of the years 1926 and 1927 on site in County Clare documenting the project. He describes one of his paintings from that period, ‘Night Candles Are Burnt Out’ (1928), as ‘depicting the transition of Ireland from a country of ancient stagnation to a state of freedom and progress’. The Shannon Scheme would produce enough energy to power the country, spurring the world's first national energy utility, the Electricity Supply Board (ESB), and the rural electrification scheme.

In the mural, below the image of the power station, is a small propeller plane clearly marked ‘Aer Lingus Teoranta’. Founded in 1936, the state airline company began with short flights between Dublin and Bristol.

Imperial innovation

It is summer 2022, and we are taking a bus from the city of Galway out to Clifden, a small but popular town in the Connemara Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region). Characteristic of the west of Ireland, the slow, meandering bus travels on a narrow N road inland, stopping at dozens of seemingly random points along the way, picking up women carrying groceries, workmen getting from one roadworks site to another, and tourists in places such as Oughterard. This is a national bus service, but it has the rhythm of rural Ireland – timetables are not as useful as chatting to the person waiting beside you. And it's good to make friends, in case the bus doesn't show up at all.

Our ultimate destination is Derrigimlagh Bog, just outside Clifden, and the site of the first regular transatlantic radio transmission service, built by Italian radio ‘pioneer’ Guglielmo Marconi in the early 1900s. Along the route, we see the jagged landscape of Connemara, divided by stone walls and fences, the land cut in unpredictable patterns by decades of turf- cutting and often grazed to the peat bed by sheep. Occasionally, evidence of the former railway that ran from Galway to Clifden makes itself visible in the landscape, a line memorialised by colonial tourism memorabilia in a disused museum in the former station building in Clifden. Like most of Ireland's colonial railways, this one was dismantled long ago, with only scattered ruins and elevated embankments marking its former pathways. Many roads still follow these routes.

A postcolonial ecological regime

We are driving on the coast, among the blanket peatlands of North Mayo. These peatlands have been accumulating carbon in their anaerobic muck for millennia, quietly depositing the environmental and cultural memory of these places in semi- aqueous soil. An eeriness saturates the landscape. It may seem cliché, but we are going back in time – at least, becoming acutely aware of the history of this place, transported to different moments and sites of conflict that awaken our senses to the entangled pasts and futures of land, energy, and technology.

We start in Rossport, where 83 km offshore, the Corrib gas field was ‘discovered’ in 1996. After having already granted exploration licences in the early 1990s, the British multinational oil and gas company Shell was granted permission to exploit the field and build an onshore refinery by the early 2000s. The Shell to Sea campaign formed in direct opposition to the project, which mobilised local protestors and wider national and international solidarity groups (Figure 3.1). The campaign connected with those who had been affected by Shell's developments in the Niger Delta, and a solidarity mural of the martyred Ken Saro- Wiwa was painted. The message was clear: this pipeline will harm this community, and is connected to wider extractive practices by multinationals, supported by the Irish state and its foreign direct investment (FDI) policies. Most in the area considered this an untenable and unjust project, and we can still see the famous Shell- to- Sea mural on a cottage in the middle of a field.