Strancally Castle stands above a bend in the Blackwater, half an hour’s drive from Youghal, in a stretch of Co Waterford where the river runs wide, and the light is mostly grey. James and George Richard Pain built it around 1830 for John Keily, MP for Clonmel, and set it in front of the ruin of the Desmond castle it replaced, on ground first fortified by Raymond le Gros.

Local legend says the occupants of that older castle once lured the landowners of the district to a banquet and dropped them through a trapdoor into a flooded cave below.

The main house runs to roughly 16,000 square feet; the estate around it came to 5,000 acres in the 1850s, was broken up by the Irish Land Commission, and left family hands with 160 acres attached. And it stands at 440 today.

The house is large enough that one architectural account measured the walk from the kitchen to the dining room, briskly, at four and a half minutes.

On 20 August, The Irish Times reported that Mark Zuckerberg had bought it, while the price was not disclosed. A spokesman said that Mark and his family were “excited to continue caring for this historic home” and looked forward to spending time in Ireland, “where Meta maintains its international headquarters.”

Yet, two days earlier, in a federal courtroom in Oakland, California, a jury had heard opening arguments against the company he founded.

I have been trying to hold those two facts apart, out of fairness, and I cannot do it. A man is entitled to buy a house, yes, but when the house has a private quay and the courtroom has a whistleblower, and both landed in the same week, the coincidence stops being a coincidence and starts being a picture of how the money moves.

Wealth on this scale does not buy comfort; it buys distance, and the thing it most reliably buys distance from is the thing that produced it.

The trial in Oakland is, on paper, four states: California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey, before US District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers.

In practice, it is the first of 29 state attorneys general to reach a courtroom, the opening front of a multidistrict litigation that has consolidated 3,137 cases. The eight jurors hearing it are advisory, as Maria Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, who serves on the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, will decide.

The states allege that Meta engineered Facebook and Instagram to be compulsive for minors through algorithmic ranking, infinite scroll, and notification design, that it knew what it was doing, that it said otherwise in public, and that it harvested data from children under 13 in breach of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.

California’s deputy attorney general, Megan O’Neill, put the alleged business model in four verbs: hook, hold, harvest, hide. She pointed the jury to internal material from 2016 in which the metric that mattered was teen time spent, and to a company study with a title no press office would have chosen: “Long Term Retention: The Young Ones Are The Best Ones.”

Then Arturo Bejar took the stand. Bejar was an engineering director at Meta from 2009 to 2015 and came back as a contractor to study teenage well-being on Instagram. On 19 and 20 August, he told the court that the company’s break reminders were designed to fail, that Meta operated a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to millions of suspected underage accounts, and that the constraint was never capability.

“If Mark makes something a priority, mountains move in months,” he said. He was less measured about the rest of it: “You just cannot trust Mark Zuckerberg with kids.”

Meta rejects all of it, and its lawyer, Paul Schmidt, told the jury the states were cherry-picking, and the company has called the states’ theoretical maximum exposure of $1.4 trillion “outlandish”, with “no basis in fact or law”.

It also points to what it has built: Instagram Teen Accounts, introduced in 2024, which restrict who can contact under-18s, and parental controls that set limits on time.

On the arithmetic, Meta has a point: that number comes from stacking statutory penalties per affected teenager, and it would be closer to the company’s entire equity value than to any penalty ever imposed on anyone. Adolescent mental health is a tangle of causes, and no honest reading of the literature lets you draw a straight line from one app to one illness.

But that is not the question in front of the court. The question is what the company knew about the design and what it chose. In March, a California jury found Meta and Google negligent in the case of a young woman who started on YouTube at six and Instagram at 11, awarding $6 million and assigning Meta 70 per cent of it. The sum is trivial, but the finding is not.

It was the first time a jury treated these products as products, with defects, rather than as neutral surfaces on which other people’s lives happen.

Mark Zuckerberg himself has never been especially confused about what screens do. In 2019, he said plainly that he did not want his own children sitting in front of a television or a computer for long stretches, and drew a distinction between talking to their grandparents on a video call and, in his words, going from video to video.

They were toddlers then, so this is not a statement about how he parents now, but rather about what he understood, publicly, seven years ago, about the difference between connection and consumption. His company has spent the years since being sued over which one it built.

Ireland is where the two halves of this story meet, and not because of the castle. Meta’s international headquarters are in Dublin, and its data centre campus is at Clonee. Last month, the Central Statistics Office reported that data centres consumed 23 per cent of Ireland’s metered electricity in 2025, up from five per cent in 2015.

That is 7,663 gigawatt-hours, and urban households took 18 per cent, while rural households took nine. The servers now draw more current than every home in every Irish city put together, on a grid so strained that Dublin was effectively closed to new data centre connections from 2021, and reopened only on terms requiring large new sites to bring their own generation.

In Louisiana, the arrangement is more explicit. Meta’s Hyperion campus in Richland Parish is a $50 billion build heading for five gigawatts of capacity. Entergy is putting up three new gas plants and a 500kV transmission line costing around $550 million to feed them, and the Alliance for Affordable Energy, a consumer advocacy group, argues that existing residential and commercial ratepayers will carry the costs that Meta does not, on plants that will outlive Meta’s 15-year contract by decades.

Meta has guided to as much as $145 billion in capital spending this year. That programme dwarfs the child safety litigation on every axis except the moral one.

A company builds machines that hold children’s attention, monetises the attention, spends the proceeds on more machines, and passes the electricity bill to households in Louisiana and the grid pressure to households in Ireland. And the man at the top of it buys 440 acres of the same country, on a river, behind a wall.

Children are not the only ones being held, of course. They are simply the ones a state can prove it owed a duty to.

In June, the Department of Housing counted 17,482 people in emergency accommodation in Ireland, 5,620 of them children, a rise of nearly 10 per cent in a year. Those children, like many others in this world, get a castle once a summer, in wet sand, on a day someone can spare the bus fare.

This reminds me of a book, one of the first books I had to read when I started studying Political Science, which is Il Principe by Niccolò Machiavelli. The book is not a defence of cruelty, but rather a description of how power actually behaves, written by a man who had watched it from the inside and decided to record what rulers do rather than what they ought to do.

His most famous advice, in the eighteenth chapter, concerns the distance between those two things. A prince should appear merciful, faithful, humane, and upright, Machiavelli wrote, and should be all of them, but should keep a mind so framed that when he needs not to be, he can change to the opposite. Everyone sees what you appear to be, but few really know what you are.

He had a name for that standard: verità effettuale, the effectual truth, which means judging a thing by what it does rather than by the picture it offers of itself. It is close to what Maria Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has been asked to do, alone, with a jury that can only advise her.

And it is why this era feels Machiavellian to me, not for the ruthlessness but for the calm. The engineering meeting where time spent is a metric like any other. The spokesman’s sentence about caring for a historic home was released while a former employee sat under oath a continent away.

Meta will appeal whatever Oakland decides, and it is lobbying Congress for protection from these suits while the trial runs. Six weeks were set aside for it, which puts a ruling near the end of September. The remedies the states actually want are not the trillion-dollar headline. They are duller and far more dangerous to the business: age limits with teeth, no infinite scroll, no engagement-maximising ranking for minors, and the deletion of models trained on children’s data.

Four and a half minutes from the kitchen to the dining room. It is a good detail, and it has stayed with me all week, because it is a measurement of exactly one thing.

How far can you get from the people who make your dinner without ever leaving the house?

There is no harm at all in a man buying a house, so fair play to him: it is a lovely stretch of river, the Blackwater has one of the great salmon runs in the country, and Waterford has survived worse blow-ins than a Palo Alto man with a taste for the Gothic Revival.

If the worst thing billionaires did was buy castles, we would be living through something close to a golden age, and he could have the two beside it as well, with our blessing.

The problem was never the castle, but I cannot wonder about the invoice, and whose name ends up at the top of it. Whoever buys Strancally pays for Strancally, and there the matter would rest, except that the €360 lands on everyone boiling a kettle in Tallaght, the gas plants in Richland Parish land on whoever opens an Entergy bill in January, and the attention that funded the whole arrangement was taken, the states allege, from children who were never asked and never invoiced.

He has bought himself a place at the table, while the rest of us are still at the banquet, keeping an eye on the floor.

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