'Some downsizing to help the housing crisis that we can all do'

Irish Daily Mirror

6 days ago

There are a lot of big numbers behind the ongoing social calamity that is Ireland's housing crisis.
There are the 15,378 people officially listed as homeless for starters.
The average monthly rent that just broke the €2,000 barrier this week.
The 50,000 houses needed every year.
The 30,330 that got built in 2024.
The 1.18 million middle-aged and older people who the Government reckons could downsize to let younger families have their homes.
But there is a number that has become part of the problem that never gets talked about.
It dwarfs all those other figures – even the €430,000 mooted salary for a housing czar to undo all the blockages in the system.
Think of the largest number you can, then double it, and I bet you won't come close to the notion of a 'Zettabyte'.
A Zettabyte is one sextillion bytes of data. Or maybe you prefer to understand it as 10 to the power of 21 bytes. Or one trillion gigabytes if that helps.
The point is, it's big.
Now imagine 100 of them back-to-back and you will have the number of units of stuff that the world stores in "The Cloud".
The Cloud - as we have only recently come to comprehend - is actually composed of vast swathes of the Irish landscape, dotted with data centres that are filled with hard drives.
They use up 21 per cent of all the electricity we have in the country.
And recently we learned they have become another major blockage to building houses.
Homes that need to be plugged into our national grid to get built are losing out to new data centres on a first come, first served basis.
There are over 80 of these cloud storage hangars around Ireland with another 50 in the pipeline.
But aren't they vital to the 21st century information economy you ask?
Well yes, some of them may well be. The ones that let you access your money to tap and pay for a pint, stream your favourite series or book a hotel for instance.
But consider the rest of the stuff up there in cyberspace, stored forever and sucking electricity like a planet-sized vampire squid.
Experts estimate 90 per cent of everything in the cloud is junk. The same percentage of data is never accessed three months after it has been stored.
There was a time when all that was deemed worth knowing about humanity fit on to a 12-inch, gold LP we sent to space aboard the starship Voyager.
Now to print out one zettabyte of what we keep online you would need the paper from 20 trillion trees. (There are only about 3.5 trillion left on the planet).
There are 320 billion emails sent every day, and 62 trillion spam emails a year.
Each one uses the energy it takes to power a light bulb for six minutes.
And most of them are hanging about at the back of a vast cyber drawer with a load of other junk.
Like that hilarious gif of Homer Simpson melting back into the hedges you sent for the gazillionth time.
The clip of your ice bucket challenge in 2014.
The 47 videos the woman in front of me at Vicar Street uploaded last month of a gig she missed even though she was there.
How many zettabytes are needed just to store the history of all those passive aggressive thumbs up emojis we send to friends and family members?
Or to keep a permanent digital record of some of the stupidest things ever uttered?
Like the internet user who posted to wonder why we haven't invented a reverse microwave that makes things cold?
All of this and much, much, much more is out there… preserved and sucking on precious power every second of every day.
So if we are serious about doing everything we can to tackle the huge numbers behind the housing crisis, why not start with a bit of online downsizing?
A national clear-out day to press delete forever on the ginormous, steaming pile of digital sh**e that is sitting in a data hangar in the middle of Kildare, eating up all the energy someone needs to get their home connected to the national grid.