OK, SO NOW we have a national hosepipe ban. Our reservoirs are low, and the number doing the rounds is that Ireland’s data centres drank roughly a billion litres of water last year; seemingly, this is about the same as Sligo town. I think it sounds like a good number and so it lands.

I read a piece here in The Journal recently that made an argument I mostly agree with. Yes, the sector is opaque. Ireland has been slow and grudging in transposing its EU reporting obligations, to the point of an infringement case. Yes, it seems a secrecy provision drafted by lobbyists ended up in our regulations. All of that is true, and all of it is indefensible, and I have no interest in defending it.

But I want to ask the awkward follow-up question. Suppose we win. Suppose every facility in the State publishes its litres and its kilowatt-hours tomorrow, all of them audited, facility-level, no aggregation, no commercial-sensitivity dodge. What, precisely, do we then do with it?

I think we would do what we already do. We would hold the number up beside a town, or a county’s worth of homes, and feel that an argument had been made.

It is single-entry bookkeeping. We have built ourselves a very detailed debit column and no credit column at all, and then we wonder why the accounts never resolve into a decision.

I have spent 20 years in and around public procurement, which is a field that made exactly this mistake and eventually grew out of it. For decades, we awarded contracts to the lowest price, because price is the number you can verify, defend at audit and print in a headline.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock........

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