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VOTING HAS FINALLY begun around the country in the referendum on the fiscal compact.
Ireland’s 3.13 million registered voters have the chance to cast their votes in hundreds of polling stations across Ireland’s 43 constituencies from 7 o’clock this morning.
Polls so far suggest that the referendum will pass: support for the Yes side had fallen slightly in the most recent polls at the weekend, but remains at around 60 per cent when undecideds are excluded. No campaigners point out that polls were proved wrong in votes on the Nice and Lisbon treaties in 2001 and 2008.
Turnout is expected to be between 50 and 60 per cent. Turnout in the last Lisbon treaty was 59 per cent, but bad weather and a large number of undecided voters in this referendum may lead to a lower turnout.
A copy of the Treaty has been delivered to every home in the country and households have also received the independent guide from the Referendum Commission which explains what the Treaty is about.
The first indications of the result are expected early on Friday afternoon with a full result later that day.
Where do I vote?
You should have received a polling card by now which will have the address of the polling station where you can go to cast your vote. Polling stations will be open between 7am and 10pm.
Do I need to bring the polling card with me?
You don’t need to bring your polling card with you to vote. You should, however, bring some valid form of personal identification like a passport or a driving licence. It won’t always be asked for, but if it is, you’ll need to show it.
Aside from passport or driving licence, types of acceptable ID include an employee identity card containing a photograph, a student identity card issued by an educational institution and with a photograph, a travel document containing a name and photograph, or a bank or savings or credit union book containing your address in the constituency. It’s also acceptable to show a cheque book, a cheque card, a credit card, a birth certificate or a marriage certificate, as long as it’s accompanied by another document which confirms your address in the constituency.
I never received a polling card. Can I still vote?
It depends. If you’re an Irish citizen, aged at least 18 and living in Ireland then you are entitled to vote, but you have to be on the electoral register. You can check whether you are or not on checktheregister.ie.
You’ll be asked to put in your province and the name of your local authority, as well as your name and address.
If for some reason you didn’t receive a polling card, don’t worry. You’ll still be allowed to vote as long as your name is on the register and you bring along identification.
I haven’t made up my mind yet. Where can I get more information?
Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, the Referendum Commission and the European Policy Centre all answered the most commonly-asked questions about the Treaty on TheJournal.ie yesterday, if you’re still looking for more information before you vote. There’s also this version of the Fiscal Compact rewritten in layman’s terms.
When will the votes be counted?
Counting the votes will start at 9 o’clock on Friday morning in 26 count centres around the country. The overall result will be announced from the central results centre in Dublin Castle and are expected by Friday evening.
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future data centre should be banned unless they pay for their own source of energy and maintenance, independently of the grid.
@Dominic Leleu: Independently of the grid? How does that work? Should data centers have their own in-built nuclear power stations, or would you prefer they burn coal?
@Jason Memail: they should have their own wind turbines. There are several companies in Cork harbour each have their own huge wind turbine. It should be mandatory for data centres.
@Padraig: If it was possible that wind turbines alone could provide enough power to consistently run a data centre (it’s not), why wouldn’t companies build them today instead of buying electricity from the grid?
@Padraig: So when you need information stored files from a data centre they will say “The answer is blowing in the wind”
@Jason Memail: I know that. But they need to making a big contribution to their own power.
@Dominic Leleu: How about solving the problem rather than trying to block freedom of speech provided by information technology. “Designed in the late 1960s to meet increasing demand for electricity from the expanding economy, the plant’s job was to deliver instantaneous power to support households across the State as more people started switching on cookers and lights and firing up home heating systems.
From the outset, Turlough Hill could ramp up to full power of 292MW in just 70 seconds, enough electricity for 300,000 homes, ensuring the State system could keep up with rising demand for electricity at peak times.
At night, when demand for electricity is at its lowest, the water is pumped back up through the hill to refill the upper lake.”
@thomas molloy: Turlough Hill is on a twice daily cycle, 250MW down, 350MW pump back up. All done “in house” by the ESB off the Moneypoint coal. Wind power is just a complete and very expensive waste of time Subsidy Harvesting and wont financially carry supplying storage for free. There is only one way to power data centres and that’s SMRs. If we dont have them here, then it makes no difference to Climate Change, if they are somewhere else.. No one baring the French will be meeting their Paris obligations. Ger real.
@Jason Memail: wouldn’t be entertaining a silly comment.
Should have been this way from the start. Zero common sense!
@John Paul Long: agreed. Pure lunacy and yet I can’t cut a bit of turf. That’s the Greens for ya.
@Fergus O’Donnell: i thought the whole thing was you can cut turf, you just can’t sell it commercially?
@Fergus O’Donnell: The article says generators at Data Centres emitted 125,000 tonnes CO2 over 3 years, or 41,666 tonnes per year. This is 0.1% of national emissions (50 to 55 million tonnes CO2 per year).
On the other hand, the dairy sector emissions increased 95% over 20 years, by an extra 2.4 million tonnes CO2 equivalent per year (more than 50 times the CO2 emissions from the generators at data centres), and this comes with the additional cost of polluting Irish rivers and putting African farmers out of business. But you can talk negatively of farming. It’s almost like data centres are used as a distraction from noticing larger and more polluting sectors.
Data centres are a problem, I don’t deny this. But it’s not CO2 emissions, it’s their expanding use of electricity.
@John Paul Long: This is nothing new. Proper datacenters already have backup generators in case the mains fail. They can even back feed into the grid when demand is high.
The fụck’s the point of going green if these big corpos just completely offsets all efforts while we’re being taxed to death for it on top if it!!?
@Kieran Menon: OPTICS
@Kieran Menon: backhanders and optics. Usual pigs at the trough.
@Kieran Menon: that is the point. It’s a compete scam.
@Kieran Menon: The article says generators at Data Centres emitted 125,000 tonnes CO2 over 3 years, or 41,666 tonnes per year. This is 0.1% of national emissions (50 to 55 million tonnes CO2 per year).
@Kieran Menon: who’s going green? ireland are one of the biggest polluters per capita in europe.
Please mr Facebook twitter amazon…please look like your doing something so we can make it look like we’re doing something…please sir ..you don’t have to ..thank you sir.thank you very much sir…
@David Cotter: why not use apple taxes for capital spending to build hydro electric generators. The Shannon hydroelectric Scheme was a major development by the Irish Free State in the 1920s to harness the power of the River Shannon. Its product, the Ardnacrusha power plant, is a hydroelectric power station located near Ardnacrusha within County Clare approximately 2.4 kilometres (1.5 mi) from the Limerick border. It is Ireland’s largest river hydroelectric scheme and is operated on a purpose built headrace connected to the River Shannon. The plant includes fish ladders so that returning fish, such as salmon, can climb the river safely past the power station.
@thomas molloy: Ardnacrusha generates 80MW at full power. e.g. for 60% of the year. Our present average load is over 5000MW., increasing fast. A SMR like the whole World are suddenly on about, is around 300MW. The great guru of Global Warming, Prof.James Hansen now says the whole issue is coming on far faster than they predicted and the only way to counter it is with a mass move into Nuclear.
The article says generators at Data Centres emitted 125,000 tonnes CO2 over 3 years, or 41,666 tonnes per year. This is 0.1% of national emissions (50 to 55 million tonnes CO2 per year).
On the other hand, 37.8% of national CO2 eq. emissions is from agriculture (2023 figures), and substantial proportion of this is from the dairy sector.
Emissions from the dairy sector increased 95% between 2000 and 2017, mostly attributed to the abolition of the EU milk quota and subsequent massive expansion of the dairy herd. Dairy emissions increased by 157.7 tonnes per dairy farm year between 2010 and 2017. In 2010 there were 15,654 dairy farms, in 2020 there were 15,319 dairy farms. Thus, their total emissions increased by 2.4 millon tonnes CO2 per year, a 4% increase on nations emissions.
Over 90% of milk products are is exported, most to the UK and other EU countries, but also increasingly to China and Africa (encurring futher CO2 emissions from transport). Cheap EU milk is putting African farmers out of business.
https://www.thejournal.ie/creamed-off-dairy-exports-6461193-Aug2024/
Additionally, the expansion of the dairy sector incresed agricultural pollution, with nitrates in rivers increasing year on year. See:
“Rivers and lakes face pollution crisis caused by Ireland’s dairy industry”
Total CO2 eq. emissions from the dairy sector are about 100 times the emissions from data centre generators (Emissions from the dairy sector fell back slightly in the last few years).
The problem of data centres isn’t their CO2 emissions, it’s their disproportionate electricity use which indeed threatens grid stability.
Ref.:
Läpple, D., Carter, C.A. and Buckley, C., 2022. EU milk quota abolition, dairy expansion, and greenhouse gas emissions. Agricultural Economics, 53(1), pp.125-142.
@David Jordan: and how much of the atmosphere is C02?
@David Jordan: you should look up the carbon cycle. And you might realise that the agricultural emissions don’t stack up, and It’s what the fuel industry wants you to believe because it makes them look good.
@Jim: 427.24 ppm, and the highest level in c. 16 million years. CO2 levels increased by 50% since 1900, 41% of this increase is due to the addition of 2.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 from fossil fuels and land use changes e.g. cutting down vast tracts of forest.
https://keelingcurve.ucsd.edu/
Friedlingstein, P., O’sullivan, M., Jones, M.W., Andrew, R.M., Hauck, J., Olsen, A., Peters, G.P., Peters, W., Pongratz, J., Sitch, S. and Le Quéré, C., 2020. Global carbon budget 2020. Earth System Science Data Discussions, 2020, pp.1-3.
The other question is why does such a relatively small amount of added gas have such a pronounced warming effect, with global temperature rising ten times faster than the end of the last ice age and reaching levels not seen in the last 130,000 years?
https://imgur.com/gallery/global-temperature-co2-levels-last-2000-years-5ioVzFY
Firstly the science behind the greenhouse effect in not new, it was first discovered by the French scientist and mathematician Joseph Fourier, who wrote in 1827,…
“As a dam built across a river causes a local deepening of the stream, so our atmosphere, thrown as a barrier across the terrestrial rays, produces a local heightening of the temperature at the Earth’s surface.”
The mistake you make is to think of CO2 as a once off deposit, but CO2 is an interest rate (global temperature is money in a bank account). Added CO2 and other greenhouse gasses accrue interest, adding a fraction of a penny to Earth’s temperature each day/night cycle, this build ups. There have been more than 45,625 days of accrued interest since 1900.
For example, if an ancestor of mine deposited £15 (analogous to 15 Celsius) in a bank account in 1900, with a tiny interest rate of only 0.04% per year (analogous to CO2 levels), the bank account would contain £15.77 by 2025, an increase of 5.1% (analogous to temperature increase).
This is how low levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gasses warm the planet (there is also an important amplifying effect of increased evaporation, from water vapour).
@David Jordan: that’s a great way of saying 0.004%
The information you are providing is pretty much meaningless & you are presenting the “warming effect” out of context.
It’s quite interesting the ‘studies’ you are quoting, their sources of funding & the counter studies which tell a different story but you wouldn’t know that because you are uding a GPT.
Funny how those desperate to ‘convince’ others of their argument try to baffle with reams of ‘information’ pulled from many sources.
The fact is, there is no “climate change” there is an environmental catastrophe created in the name of combating a scam.
It’s good to see that data centres won’t be subjected to any harmful caps on their fossil fuel usage. However, future data centres should also have the renewable energy requirement waved in order to make sure that they are maximising their output. I hope someday Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil give up on their renewable energy fantasy and stop forcing the rest of the economy to change over as well. Renewable energy simply isn’t working. The sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. Look at what happened to Germany. They relied on renewable energy so much that they had power shortages. Then they were forced to import coal from Poland and Russia, the worst pollutant of all and energy prices tripled. Despite being subsidised for 25 years, renewables only make up 14% of our energy.
Solar powered or diesel?
have your say