Facebook’s donation to Meath County Council

When you think of Facebook’s presence in Ireland, you’ll inevitably think of its EMEA headquarters at the Docklands in Dublin but a key part of its European infrastructure can be found in the small town of Clonee in Co. Meath.

Facebook has built a data centre, covering about 250 acres, outside the town, which is not too far from north county Dublin and Mulhuddart where Amazon has built one of its hulking data centres.

Data centres are of course vital pieces of infrastructure for tech companies and Ireland has attracted many big developments over the years, like Amazon, Microsoft and soon TikTok.

Building these massive facilities means forging and maintaining good relationships with local planning authorities and county councils as data centres have faced objections over the years — who’ll ever forget the Apple/Athenry debacle?

Facebook appears keen to have a good relationship with Meath County Council as its Clonee facility continues to expand.

Facebook reached out to the council in September last year with info about the tech giant’s community action grants.

After initial discussions on ideas for projects, Facebook agreed to donate €45,100 to the council to design and erect visual communication boards in council-owned playgrounds. The boards will carry messages to assist children and adults that are non-verbal or pre-verbal or have other communication issues, to make playgrounds more inclusive.

Aoife Flynn, community development manager at Facebook’s data centre division, spoke with the council’s senior executive officer Dara McGowan in November. Some quick handwritten notes were taken on what the donation would entail and that it should avoid the wording ‘grant’:

Soon after, a donation letter was agreed, which you can read here, and below is a snap of the details from the purchase order.

The signs have not yet been put up, according to the council, but there will be 20 of them erected sometime in April or May. Local media covered the news of the boards in December with reference to the Facebook donation. During the course of Facebook’s back and forth with the council, the company requested that its logo be featured on the boards.