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A Fine Gael Senator is proposing to change the CAO applications system to give points for social and athletic involvement.
Senator for Cavan-Monaghan Joe O’Reilly has proposed to change the current 625 points system to award 550 points for academic subjects and 75 points to social, cultural and athletic achievements. The plan received support on the floor of the Seanad and is backed by O’Reilly’s Fine Gael parliamentary colleagues.
“I accept the methodology of the current system but it doesn’t give recognition for students involved in social and active activities,” O’Reilly told TheJournal.ie.
“I just want a system that will reward social action and affirm cultural and sporting activity.”
O’Reilly has discussed the issue with the Minister for Education and Skills Joe McHugh and is planning to put forward a formal submission. Under the new system, 50 points would be awarded for social and community action and 25 points for cultural and athletic achievement.
It is hoped that the social points would give students “awareness, empathy and a desire to improve their world”. Social points would be granted for community activities such as helping the elderly.
The new areas would be graded internally in schools and administered by a core pastoral team in each school. There would be national criteria and locally administered guidelines.
“It would especially benefit children from public schools around the country and level the playing pitch for them,” O’Reilly said.
The Senator added that the current system should be a bit more rounded but he understands the importance of focusing on academia. There is no set timeline for the initiative but he is hopeful it will progress further soon.
“The sooner the better, but these things need to be tested first,” the Senator said.
Career coach and business mentor Ronan Kennedy believes the new system could be feasible and would build confidence levels of less academic students.
“I think we need to take a more holistic look at the ability of our young people in order to let them flourish,” said Kennedy.
He added that the points for athletic activities would benefit students as a “healthy body leads to a healthy mind”.
“I wouldn’t think it would make it as accessible as we would like but it would help to build the confidence of a lot of people who are talented in other areas that may not transfer academically,” said Kennedy.
The initiative aims to make students more intellectually rounded and active which would aid them in future academic study.
A Department of Education and Skills spokesperson said the senior cycle in secondary school is currently under review with an advisory report due to be completed in June 2019.
The spokesperson did not mention whether O’Reilly’s proposal would be included in the review.
No reference to any research or data source, a rambling attack to justify herself ‘the legislation I have proposed’ hero.
@Tony Gordon: For sure. How this person is ever given a platform to preach nonsensical ramblings is beyond me. PBP and their ideologies would ruin nations.
@Alan Wright:
This is highly misguided…
These Data Centers actually save a huge amount of wasteful energy.. Data centers are used for a lot of cloud applications..
Just take video conferencing, that is a cloud application which is hosted in a number of data centers worldwide . Think about not having that. How many road trips and plane rides would we have to take for every meeting..
I work in cloud applications, before that I was on 200 flights a year… Since 2012 I barley make 4-5 a year… How much carbon footprint did that save…
Some would say we can do it without Data Centers… Yes could.. But it would be far less efficient and use more power…
There was another reason from the article that Data Centers take up existing renewable power… Seriously, Demand drives supply… We have not come close to harnessing the power available…
Yes, Data Centers are the usually run by major corporations but it gives us many services which is cheaper and less wasteful of energy…
Sorry but this is an very poor article..
@DK Innovation: i think shes mixing up crypto mining in China with data centres lol
Think this article is a first for the Journal, in that pretty much every comment is in agreement with how ridiculous the content actually is.
@DK Innovation: careful now DK, coming on here and speaking sense will get you frowned upon by the PBP empty heads.
@Chewey Bacca:
About half of all data center power consumption is actually due to crypto mining unfortunately. Most systems don’t run at full power 24/7 like cryptominers run them.
Cryptomining is a genuine environmental problem, especially since there is no benefit.
@Chewey Bacca:
Source: https://digiconomist.net/bitcoin-may-consume-as-much-energy-as-all-data-centers-globally
@Tony Gordon:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaJpYjO136o
Watch and listen to how much energy is used to “mine” crypto currency
@David Bourke:
Towards the end of the article she claims that ‘data centres are neither ‘sustainable nor essential’. In the previous passage she says they are an ‘essential part of modern living’. Which is it then?
@Valthebear: The article didn’t really produce any cogent arguments against the location of data centers here. Saying we’ve heard these things before isn’t a valid argument
@Mickety Dee: agree. Poorly written article, obviously trying to grab the red/green vote, but no substance to it.
@Valthebear:
While Data Centers aren’t entirely Green, they promote a huge amount of green activity.. e.g. Video Conferencing, Distance learning, Reduced Business travel, just think about video stores compared to netflix, traffic,…
This article borders on the ridiculous…
@DK Innovation: Do you work in one of these places? How does generating Gigawatts of energy help reduce our carbon footprint?
@edward:
@edward:
The processing has to go on somewhere… You can have disparate processing in computers or smaller server rooms or in a Data Center…
The DC are more economical due to shared resources and optimal conditions.
Think of this way… City Buses use more energy and take more space than a car. But would removing buses reduce our carbon footprint? No. While some people might cycle or walk, we know enough cars would negate that very quickly.
How does moving data centres from Ireland to a different country help the climate.
Not in my back yard.
@Alan Leahy: exactly, pure nimbyism of the highest.
@Alan Leahy: Warmer countries would require more cooling. Even worse would be to shut down data centres altogether and move companies from the shared infrastructure back to all hosting their own hardware
@Alan Leahy: Similar to Ireland reducing their dairy and beef herds to appease climate activists and instead importing more Brazilian beef raised on cleared rainforest.
@Alan Leahy:
You’re completely wrong here. Ms Smith and many more subscribe to the belief that we live on a Planet called Ireland. Nothing to do with Planet Earth, where there is more methane already coming out of the Tundra and Artic ice, than from a billion more dairy cows. The policy of PBP is anyhow to hunt away all the big FDI and also the data centres and to re name our island “The Peoples Republic of New Cuba”.
The solution to this issue and many more, is to firstly put some SMRs into each of the old peat stations. Next to them the data centres, and then next to them, using all the waste heat, a thousand hectares of covered 24/7/365 LED grow house, for everything from salads to cut flowers to vegetables, to avocados, bananas and all the rest. Then next come the Black Soldier Fly farms, their larvae eating most of our one million tonnes of food waste year, here in Ireland alone, before being fed to the salmon, tilapia, hake, cod, and fowl. Then finally the rest of the bog area for sequestration. Its what’s called joined up thinking.
@Nicholas Grubb: we’ll have none of that solution based sense around here please.
@Alan Leahy: it does help to reduce Ireland’s carbon costs for which we are liable. I’m no leftist but she has a point here. If we build data centres and those add to the carbon costs of Ireland as a whole we actually lose money in fines, hundreds of millions possibly, this is a subsidy of the companies. It’s a cost benefit analysis – will the taxation from jobs offset the fines? Not with data centres.
And even though the companies claim to be carbon neutral this is often because they plant trees in California or a solar farm in Africa as an offset, which doesn’t help Ireland.
@Eugene Norman: You’re right in saying that these will ads to Irelands carbon costs and could end up being fined for our carbon outputs, but this just highlights the stupidity of the system. Climate change is a global matter, so why not locate these centres in temperate areas of the world like Ireland where less carbon is consumed in keeping them cool. They will be built either way so why not locate them where they operate as efficiently as possible? Similarly we produce beef in this country with lower environment impact than elsewhere, yet they propose to reduce the national herd while simultaneously importing it from halfway across the world where farming is massively damaging the global environment.
@Longlin: yes but those aren’t the laws at the moment. It would be a very specific law to exempt Ireland for a data centre and those are hard to get passed. As it now stands from a cost benefit analysis it’s a cost to the Irish taxpayer.
@Alan Leahy: I’d like to see the analysis of water usage stats. Apparently an article in the Sunday Business Post. Is it trying to tell us that a single data centre will use 5 millions litres of water ? That’s just not true. I’ve seen these sites built and they have massive water tanks and inground pools where the water is stored and recycled. They don’t just dump the water and refill the tanks no more then you dump the water out of your car radiator. Yes you top it up now and again due to evaporation.
It’s world noting that ireland is in the Golden temperature range so the data centres there are most efficient in the world. Not too hot or too cold outside that requires additional cooling or heating to be applied.
Brid, this article is full of inaccuracies and very poorly researched. It’s a huge misconception around the lack of employment these centres bring. Both direct and indirect employment from multiple industries serving DC’s with quality jobs is being discounted. You mention gas turbines but DC owners are having to resort to this because the state hasn’t provided proper grid capacity. No DC owner wants to build their own power station, its a result of the above. DC owners will buy as much green power as they possibly can and they do. Unfortunately, Ireland is years behind due to poor planning process and lack of investment. Many DC providers are looking to supply their own green energy. This includes building their own offshore wind farms etc. Please research before attacking livelihoods.
@Rapid McDeadly: How many jobs do they create exactly?
@CASO: Directly, you have on site support staff, security teams, electricians, IT operations, refrigeration engineers, network teams, building operations etc. Then there’s contracted maintenance vendors, suppliers etc. You have the 100′s of systems and network engineers who connect to the DC to maintain it. Also, you need the servers and network equipment for the whole thing to work so whole factories of people employed to make them ie: Dell, HP, IBM. Then you have the software that runs in them with whole multinational companies employing thousands to build and maintain that. Then you have the 1000′s of support staff those companies need. The bit people forget is the DC is built to be connected to and without them there is no Amazon/Facebook or the like and all the people they employ.
@CASO: About 50 or 1.5MW per employee.
One data centre consumes roughly the same as 4,000EV running.
@CASO: it is estimated data centres will create an additional 1,800 jobs this year alone.
https://www.irishexaminer.com/business/economy/arid-40045292.html
@Jimmy Nolan: Are you actually referencing data centre power usage per employee that works there? What a bizarre point.
@CASO: how many people here are employed in the tech industry? Exactly I don’t know but I can tell you it’s a lot more than any idea the looney left came up with. the taxes these employees pay alone keep Smith in her massive salary and her lifetime pension.
@Rapid McDeadly:
Actually play golf with a guy who makes just racks for the servers…
I think these guys have watched a movie that has a data center in the mountains with one guy there for years. It is so far from the truth…
DC are quite aggressive in wanting green energy. They get ranked for green energy and they consider it apart of there corporate responsibility…
This article is real bad… I don’t even blame the left for this joke. This seems to be an anti-corporation (any corporation) rant.. It’s mainly nonsense
@Rapid McDeadly: if the state hasn’t provided the proper grid capacity then we need to wait to build more DCs until it does. Surely. That’s cart before horse.
@Rapid McDeadly: Hang on, a lot of the people needed are not onsite. How many people do they employ onsite once up running? Simple question
@CASO: likely 30-40 direct jobs per site. 10 sites 400 jobs, 70 sites 2800 jobs. That’s direct employment. Then you have all the support companies. Electrical and data cabling, refrigeration engineers, building maintainence, HVAC operations. So about another 10-15 indirectly employed to service sites. Let’s say they move around 5 sites. 14×15. Another 210 employed through services. Just to give you a rough estimate.
Then all of the IT technicians that work for the companies that have hardware operating in these buildings.
@Graham Crosby: Simple answer. Depends on the size of the site but anywhere from 50 to over 1k. That’s the point missing when people look at just on site though… There’s hundreds to thousands more directly employed by the exact same company maintain the network, systems, software enviroments etc from multiple offices. That’s without any of the indirect I mentioned. All these people are working ‘in’ the data centre, just virtually.
How about instead of just trying to restrict the building of Data Centres we look at becoming world leaders in them. The facts are we have an almost perfect combination of talent and climate for DCs in this country. We should look at what can be done with the waste heat from them. It’s possible we could use it to heat factories and homes. It could be used to provide heat to greenhouses to grow fruit and veg all year round. I believe in Stockholm up to 10k homes already get 95% of their heating requirement from DCs and Sweden are planning for DCs to provide 10% of countries heat requirements by 2035. Ireland would have less hearing requirements than Sweden so imagine what we could do.
@Ted Logan: I hear you.
@Markonline: my fat fongers ;)
@Ted Logan: because we don’t have the power grid to supply them??
@Ted Logan: The transfer of heat to community heating is a novel idea, particularly in Ireland! However, I’m not sure if this is sufficient rationale for building more – maybe it is something that should be done with existing DCs (if possible).
However, on the job front it takes very few people to run a DC and those who manage them remotely are most likely doing so from low cost countries. Some physical presence is needed but again those jobs are few, even including security.
For people in the tech industry (in Ireland and the rest of the planet) it doesn’t matter where DCs are located in general as they can still connect to them. However, latency (speed of data transfer) is an issue but then there are enough DCs spread throughout the world lessening the impact of this.
The only real employment comes from the construction of the buildings, roads and the ancillary activities around that, heating, plumbing, electricity, etc. They are not environmentally the best fit but DCs are essential (at least until we have better technologies to replace them, if ever). They are best based in cool climatic locations to reduce the need for heating, etc. Outside of the few jobs above, Ireland would be better investing in attracting more manufacturing locally where salaries feed (literally) into the communities directly. You don’t get that from DCs, except for the few people employed in them.
@Con Cussed: having DCs and attracting manufacturers are not mutually exclusive. Why can’t we do both?
While DCs mostly require a low on-site presence there is still a limited life cycle for the nodes, switches, storage, UPS etc. These will constantly need to be updated and serviced by on-site by engineers. We could grow that service industry in Ireland with highly skilled Irish engineers.
@Ted Logan: Because one offers a higher return to the nation than the other. DCs are a waste of space really, they consume land and energy that could be used for more worthwhile activities – such as manufacturing. Switches and storage are possibly engaging two (maybe three ) persons. There’s no real skill (or knowledge) needed for swapping in and out drive units, which can be done by a robot, if not already the case. Most maintenance and updates are done remotely using software, so very few people to build an industry on. Build skilled workers in other areas, this is a small one and a waste of investment. Most of the big traditional players have moved out of DC ownership in the last 20 years as the returns are not there. A number of them have even stopped providing such services to their customers, or are in the process of stepping away from those services.
AWS, MS, Google, etc. now own this space, which they’ve built based on their own needs in the first place and then they developed a business model along the same. These companies have been successful as was part of their core business.
@Mike: We could require DCs to add to the grid as part of planning conditions, which could be via grid storage and/or generation capacity. Grid buffers will be critical for grids with high renewable sources.
As @Ted Logan mentioned, waste heat has the potential for district heating, something we have only started to tap into. The Tallaght District Heating Scheme is using heat from an AWS DC to hear some of the TU Dublin campus in Tallaght.
But we can also innovate, reuse waste heat in other applications and build technology and businesses around it.
DCs aren’t going anywhere (globally), so we should at least try to reduce their impact and build expertise here.
@Con Cussed:
So Apple are going for DC in Athenry again… What space are they taking… There is other jobs that need to be done in construction, security, maintenance.. 150 people were going to work there…
I don’t see the reason not to have them.. They are environmentally friendly as they can be.. I actually hope they come and start pushing our grid to be more green..
Brid is some dose
100% free range nimbyism. If not here then Where?
At least if they are in Ireland we can ensure they comply with the best environmental standards. But “People Before Profit” would push Data Centers into Developing economies and power them with coal.
The environmental message is really simple: Think Global, Act Local
Data centres will pour private investment money into Green energy within Ireland. That is surely a good thing. They also provide high quality well paying long term jobs for the country.
Ireland’s weather is perfectly suited for data centres. If they were relocated to nearly any other European country, the environmental damage would be much much worse.
Sometimes I read things from politicians or media figures and despair that these people are calling the shots. But this morning I scrolled through the comments on this article and every single one was using rationale and logic. No nastiness, just reason and argument. It made my morning. Thank you commentators.
@Podge: haha same. Doesn’t often happen on here
@Motherofthree:
You have to thank Brid… She united us in a cause…
We are talking about climate change worldwide not ireland. So if they don’t go to ireland they go to another country and we meet our targets but the world still suffers. Our climate is ideally suited for data centres and if these go elsewhere they consume more energy and the planet suffers. I don’t get this
A data centre is worth hundreds of both direct and indirect jobs for the country. I’m all for green initiatives, but we also can’t go back to De Velara’s dancing at crossroads while everyone is emigrating to the UK. We need a balance between idealism and reality.
Eamon & Co are great at telling the average person on the street they need to do more for the environment. Most are trying to help in some way but for many it’s expensive to retro fit a house with solar panels or extra insulation or get a new hybrid car. A new data centre has just been completed new me and it will consume the power to that would normally run a town with 30k population. Its as if the green policy’s are for the little people and investors get away with ignoring them. From the time the diggers remove every ditch on the site to electricity the project demands it completely contradictory.
Yeah great idea, push out all industry to reduce our carbon footprint. It doesn’t help anyone since the datacenters and factories will just end up in China inevitably, but we’ll get to be nice and smug and look good on some meaningless green rankings.
The real elephant in the room around climate change is nuclear energy. Despite the fear-mongering, it’s actually one of the safest forms of energy production: https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/nuclear-energy-the-safest-of-all-1.1044013
Unfortunately renewable energy like solar and wind relies on large battery arrays, which are dangerous to work with, and extremely damaging to the environment when disposing. The dirty secret of solar is that it generates a lot of toxic waste.
France has been nuclear for decades, and I challenge you to think of any incidents. Until the green crowd start advocating for nuclear energy I can’t take them seriously.
@David Bourke: Ireland is an ideal location for Nuclear energy. There is a limited risk of incidents due to extreme weather or seismic activity. With the push to electric transport we will need a sizeable increase in the power we produce. Wind alone cannot provide this. And the proliferation of wind turbines is an eyesore on a lot of our beauty spots. Time to go Nuclear!
@David Bourke:
Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have their first Natrium plant due online in ‘a few years’, I guess many are kinda hoping for something similar instead of committing to existing nuclear options
“People will say it’s more eco friendly to host these data centres here, I have heard these arguments before but will not address them.” – Bríd Smith in this article basically
Ms smyth, kindly let the business of north kerry to the people of north kerry. We are sick and tired of urban idealists preaching from the pulpit, telling us rural types what to do with our land, so it looks idyllic for your annual road trip. Remember, a lot of child labour went into mining the cobalt for your electric car. Maybe you could concentrate on that for a few years, north kerry will still be here when you’ve sorted that out……
@Seosamh Mac Cionnaith: well said in fairness. This article has promoted the most coherent arguments I’ve read in a long time. I congratulate the author at least that much.
The carbon content per kWh of electricity has been consistently dropping over the past number of years, hence even if a data centre just maintained their energy efficiency their carbon footprint would also decrease.
As for the risk of data centres utilising the potential on and off shore renewable energy sources at the expense of domestic and non data centre usage, this indicates a complete lack of understanding of the potential volume of energy generation that can be obtained by wind and wave off-shore. In some off-shore projects they are having to constrain their development as they will have the potential to generate more power then can be utilised.
You lost me when you conceded “data centres are an essential part of modern living” and then in the NEXT paragraph said “They are neither sustainable nor essential.”
They do have to go somewhere, and as much as it’s challenging to keep them green, the supply of electricity creates jobs in maintenance etc.
There’s a reason PBP run at 2%. If they were in charge we’d end up like Venezuela. If any of these climate activists were serious they’d be pushing nuclear power. But they’re as hypocrital as the government when it comes to climate.
Oh the irony, data centres come here because of our climate!?!
The problem is, without data centres the internet as we know it would slow to a crawl akin to early-2000s ISDN. If you think the public are opposed to climate change policies which cause minor inconveniences, try telling people that we’re going to be going back to the days of waiting 12 hours to download single album from the likes of iTunes, or opening a YouTube video in the morning so that it might be finished buffering by the evening, or dropping everything back to 240p quality to offset the massive drop in data transfer speeds. Netflix? Forget it. VOIP? Forget it. Instagram? Open it on your phone and maybe check it again when you’ve finished your coffee to see if the photos have loaded yet.
We need to find a way to make data centres more carbon friendly or carbon neutral. Abolishing, restricting, or evicting them is completely and totally unpalatable because the inevitable side effect it will cause is, quite simply, a regression of perhaps a decade’s worth of internet improvements. Society is more wired-in than ever, the public simply will not a gargantuan reduction in internet connectivity as a trade off.
With tongue in cheek. If the HSE had been using one of these Data Centers they would never of been hacked and it wouldn’t be budgeted to cost over a billions euros to repair the damage.
@Diarmuid O’Braonáin: not even remotely true. Just putting your data into the cloud doesn’t secure it anymore than having it on premise. Sadly it’s a mistake that many companies continue to make in assuming their cloud provider takes responsibility for security.
A very ignorantly written article, the writer seems to have done little to no research on the matter but has jumped on the band wagon that Data Centres must be bad, I’m sure she would be much happier if Ireland’s folk returned /became a muck eating savage who marries their sisters. Sure why don’t we ban farming in Ireland while we are it Brid? We can import all of our food from other countries, I’m sure our farmers wouldn’t mind that at all if it makes the country “green”. I’m sure she is old enough to remember the 1980′s when we had high unemployment & we were a defacto 3rd world country on the edge of Europe. Get a grip!
Without data centres, working from home would be an impossibility for many, meaning more commuting to work and more air pollution. If data cannot be stored electronically, what’s the alternative? Back to paper?
A drop in the ocean compared with agriculture and traffic congestion but no Irish Government is going to try fix any reap problems.
@B Ó Raghallaigh: We would be far better off looking at the problem plastic, single use plastic and the lack of recycling of plastic. Its everywhere and micro plastic is a huge problem in the environment. Then we have waste management and huge landfills that are massive source of methane. Not solving any of this is just laziness and incompetence.
@B Ó Raghallaigh: 10% of the power grid currently goes to data centres..I think we should host some as our climate suits but 10% is plenty until we increase our output further..
Will be tough for government to ask people to pay more taxes for power usage unless these centres are paying the same..
They are putting huge pressure on the power grid that needs attention before we can invite any more..
One suggestion – if one of the two biggest issues around data centre footprints is water usage for cooling (the other being electricity, which is a lot harder to deal with), would there be scope for building them near coastal areas and tapping the sea as a water source? I’m no expert on the technicalities of using salt vs fresh water for cooling, but I can’t see why this wouldn’t be possible. Alternatively, building new branch lines from the canals so that they could use canal water, as was done in the past by companies such as Guinness?
@Patrick FitzGerald: The canal would boil in about 1hr ,non starter, sea no problem, but then its dumped.
Data centers are part of modern life. But Ireland will be fined by Europe for not meeting it’s carbon reduction targets.
These comments are the reason I am leaving this God forsaken wasteland of a country and going to Scotland. A lot of people tripping over themselves to justify the likes of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and other multinationals doing whatever they want without any accountability. They are in the perfect place to do these things. We won’t meet our climate targets which is a joke anyway as we are not serious about our planet’s survival as our politicians are clueless, feckless, grandstanding ridiculously overpaid ludites who helped Apple avoid paying tax and actually we paid their law bill. These companies laugh at how subservient we are to them as they hand us scraps as they bleed us dry. They are parasites but I’m sure I’m probably just a foolish, uneducated, technophobe who just doesn’t get it and the joke is on me
Well, they’re kind of needed you numpty.
Hmm, our “climate” is one of the best for data centers as they use less air conditioning and the fiber connection we have to the US. So, having data centers here is way way better than most countries.
@Seán Corcoran Antichrist: Can we exclude them from EU emission targets, if so great, if not then we need to curb them cause they will cost us in fines.. 10% of the power grid is well enough for now
Stop people coming to Ireland because all they want to do is make money and will increase our carbon footprint. BBB
Grade A professional whinger. One can only hope she loses her seat and platform come next election.
Finally, a conversation on the issue. Forget about climate change once facilitating data centres no progress can be made
have your say