Bog Communism
Ireland’s bogs were degraded by industrial exploitation. Today, they play host to a growing network of data centres. Can we reclaim them as commons, and restore their value—cultural, social and ecological—outside of capital’s logic?
“For all his love of Ireland, America had not left him untouched, and he hated the beautiful wasted space where peat might be cut and land opened up.” – H.P. Lovecraft, The Moon Bog
In Brian Friel’s 1969 play, The Mundy Scheme, the prime minister of Ireland is having a nervous breakdown. Ireland is bankrupt and Taoiseach FX Ryan’s cabinet is falling apart. Enter Mr Mundy, a wealthy Texas businessman who, alongside the Foreign Minister, a former bookie, formulates a plan to save Ireland by buying up large swathes of its “valueless” peat bogs to sell as grave plots to sentimental Irish Americans. FX Ryan sees the light, the scheme is born, and Ireland is saved. Or—almost.
Friel had yet to ascend to his eventual status as national treasure, and The Mundy Scheme was a flop. In 1969 the Republic was only 20 years old, and the project of state formation was still underway. This was not a subject for satire. But recent years have seen the play re-evaluated, described in one recent text as “post colonialist avant la lettre” and a searing dramatization of “the old human tendency to sell one’s country to the latest domineering power.”[1] Whatever its dramatic merits, The Mundy Scheme offers a prophetic vision of contemporary Ireland, one where land once deemed valueless has become a contested asset in the drive for technological expansion. Today, this is unfolding most prominently through the expansion of data centres in the Irish bogs and the privatization of land commons that attends their construction, creating a web of infrastructure veining its way across the land in service of the digital economy and the vast tech companies that dominate it.
Over the past several months, data centres have ascended to a prominent position in popular culture. At the moment, they’re hot—so much so that it is easy to forget the obscurity they only recently occupied in the public imagination. The speed with which our perceived understanding of them has grown reflects both their accelerated expansion into our physical worlds and their growing instrumentalization by politicians keen on signalling their enthusiasm for unmitigated technological progress.
Take Keir Starmer, who in January of this year while standing behind a podium emblazoned with the words PLAN FOR CHANGE, tooted his way through a speech about Britain’s future as an “AI Superpower”. The British government, he said, intended to establish data centres in Oxfordshire, one of the many areas of Britain experiencing drought conditions in recent summers.
Data centres require an immense amount of water to cool their processors, particularly AI processing data centres, which cannot be cooled using traditional air-cooling techniques. Instead, cold water is pumped into the centre, where it circulates between the processors before being released.[2] As climate change advances, summer conditions in the southern UK are likely to become drier and hotter, with an increasing likelihood of heatwaves. To place water-guzzling data centres processing AI in rural drought-sensitive areas therefore seems closer to super stupid than superpower. In Ireland, meanwhile, Taoiseach Michael Martin (another political luminary) recently announced that “we can’t declare a moratorium on AI,” because “we’d be left well behind if we do that”, adding that the country needed a “mature debate” that stopped the “demonisation of data centres.”
At the same time, data centres have become popular bogeymen on our feeds, their presence both more widely understood and increasingly sinister thanks to investigations by Instagram-activist groups like More Perfect Union, whose exposé on the rapid construction of the Memphis data centre complex housing Elon Musk’s supercomputer, Colossus, which processes X’s AI, Grok, uncovered how planning permission was pushed through at breakneck speed without adequate oversight or community engagement. Locals have since reported aural and odour pollution, as well as water shortages. The report, one among many shedding light on data centre expansion around the world, was explosive. But for over twenty years and considerably more hidden from sight, Ireland has quietly been turning into an illustrative case study for the entanglement of land, ecosystems, and technological futures.