Not Here Not Anywhere

Not Here Not Anywhere (NHNA) is a nationwide, grassroots, volunteer group campaigning to end fossil fuel exploration and the development of new fossil fuel infrastructure in Ireland, founded in July 2017 by a group of environmentalists who banded together to oppose a new oil drilling venture in Irish waters. The group is anchored in Dublin — its meetings run on Monday evenings 7-8:30pm, mostly virtual with a monthly in-person or hybrid session in the city — but organises across the Republic of Ireland with a national-policy register. The group works alongside Stop Climate Chaos Ireland, the largest Irish civil-society climate coalition, on LNG-resistance campaigns; SCC has hosted NHNA campaign materials on its site and the two organisations coordinate within the broader Irish climate movement field.

Standing programme of work

NHNA's standing portfolio spans nine named campaigns, all anchored on the group's fossil-free-future framing: Keep Ireland LNG Free; Energy Democracy; Shannon LNG and Cork LNG; the Data Centres campaign; Fossil Free Communities (local-authority climate action plans); Fossil Fuel Map; the Climate Pledge Local Elections 2024 programme; Offshore Drilling; and the Fossil Free Election Pledge. The group's standing legislative-engagement work coordinates with Irish parliamentarians on fossil-fuel infrastructure bills — The University Times' October 2024 coverage records NHNA's sustained advocacy for the LNG Free Bill into late 2024, the same year the group's Climate Pledge Local Elections programme sought candidate commitments on Irish local-authority climate action.

Data Centres campaign

NHNA's Data Centres campaign is the strand of the group's work most legible to the corpus and the entry point through which Irish grassroots climate organising is engaging the AI-infrastructure layer. The campaign's documented public footprint runs from a March 2021 webinar and a September 2023 briefing document through a sustained planning-objection apparatus that the group maintains on its own site: a data-centre planning-submission template that supporters use to formally object to data-centre proposals in their area, and a new-planning-applications page tracking projects the campaign considers actionable.

The campaign's published demands are for a moratorium on new data centres in Ireland until four conditions are met: a national cap is set on data-centre energy demand aligned with Irish climate targets; new facilities operate entirely on renewable electricity (through on-site renewable generation with storage, or a dedicated renewable grid connection); no new fossil-fuel infrastructure is built to power them; and new data centres have infrastructure in place to enable the heat they generate to be utilised for district heating systems. The campaign's supporting case rests on Ireland's structural data-centre saturation: 82 data centres operational in the State, 14 under construction, 40 with planning permission approved, and 12 awaiting decision as of June 2023, with the operational fleet accounting for 18% of all Irish electricity use — equivalent to 1.5 million homes — and EirGrid projections cited in Dublin Digital Radio's "Irish Data Centres: An Introduction by Not Here, Not Anywhere" documentary of data-centre demand reaching up to 36% of Irish electricity demand by 2030. The documentary, presented by NHNA's Jessie Dolliver and Philip Punch with software engineer Barbara Hegarty and researcher Dr Patrick Bresnihan as expert contributors, names Amazon's proposed eight-centre Mulhuddart cluster as a worked example — approximately 4.4% of the entire State's energy capacity by 2026, equivalent to Galway's consumption, in exchange for 30 post-construction jobs.

The campaign's specific legislative ask sits inside the broader Irish national-policy field. NHNA publicly supports the Bríd Smith TD data-centre moratorium bill and the campaign against the Shannon LNG terminal-and-data-centre development promoted by New Fortress Energy. That field has continued to widen around the group's framing: Dublin People reported in September 2025 that South Dublin County Council passed a resolution proposed by People Before Profit councillor Jess Spear calling for a national moratorium on new data centres and committing the council to write to the Minister for the Environment to that end — a resolution underpinned by the same data-centre-energy-demand framing NHNA's campaign has been carrying since 2021 and corroborated by Friends of the Earth-commissioned research showing Irish data-centre demand outpaced all new renewable wind energy generation between 2017 and 2023.

Place in the movement

Not Here Not Anywhere is the corpus's first Irish local-group entry, the corpus's first European data-centre opposition local-group outside the UK, and the corpus's first Irish-national-anchored fossil-free climate-movement local-group engaging the AI-infrastructure layer through a moratorium-and-planning-objection register. The non-AI-audience-engagement vector NHNA anchors — Irish climate-conscious audiences (parliamentarians, county councils, ordinary planning objectors) engaged in AI-infrastructure decisions through fossil-fuel-power-dependency framing — is structurally distinct from the engagement vectors of the corpus's existing UK data-centre opposition local-groups. Havering Friends of the Earth, Iver Heath Residents Association, and North Ockendon Residents Association all anchor sub-national, site-specific fights against named UK proposals through Green Belt, residential-amenity, and procedural-planning registers — the engagement of UK boroughs through a property-rights-and-environmental-amenity vector. NHNA's register is national, programmatic, fossil-free-framed, and tied to a substantive climate-policy ask (the moratorium plus the renewables condition plus the cap), with no anchor on any single site.

That register is the corpus's clearest example so far of an existing national climate movement inducting itself into the AI-infrastructure opposition field through pre-existing fossil-fuel-infrastructure-opposition apparatus rather than through purpose-built anti-AI organising. Ireland — the structurally most-AI-infrastructure-saturated EU economy by share-of-grid load — is the natural site for that pattern to surface first inside the European register, and NHNA's data-centres campaign supplies the connective tissue that ties Irish national climate policy to the data-centre layer of frontier AI compute through the same energy-and-planning levers the group's LNG and gas-power-station work has been pulling since 2017. The group's organising form (volunteer-led, coalition-embedded, national-policy-and-planning-objection-focused) is structurally distinct from the corpus's existing European AI-organising chapters — the AI-safety chapters at PauseAI Germany, PauseAI Paris, PauseAI Utrecht, and PauseAI London — and complements rather than duplicates the UK data-centre local-group cluster by anchoring the European fight on the side of the climate movement rather than the residents'-association or environmental-campaign-group registers.