An eight-year-old boy lay dead in the city of Dnipro after Russia rained more than 700 drones and missiles on Ukraine in the early hours of Tuesday.
In Ukrainian cities, more children were killed, injured, orphaned, traumatised and left homeless. Nearly two dozen people died and more than 100 others were injured in the aerial assault a Kyiv resident likened to “the apocalypse”.
Through it all, Ireland slept the untroubled sleep of a neutral country.
It cannot be said with certitude that the killing machinery Russia used on Tuesday contained aluminium that had been converted from alumina imported from Ireland. But neither can it be said for certain that it was not.
READ MORE
It is 11 weeks since The Irish Times revealed that alumina exported to Russia from Aughinish Alumina, Co Limerick, was being turned into aluminium in smelters there. The aluminium is then sold to a Moscow-based trading company which, in turn, supplies weapons manufacturers equipping the Kremlin’s war on Ukraine.
Here, a Government spokesman said it was taking “very seriously” the newspaper’s joint report with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, a Dutch-headquartered network of 120 journalists and 70 media outlets on six continents. It was announced that the Department of Enterprise would do its own investigation.
Asked on Morning Ireland on Tuesday if it was likely that alumina from Ireland was being used to make weapons killing Ukrainians, Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke said: “I have no information to suggest [that] at this point in time.”
Wilful ignorance is a standard dodge of Irish neutrality. As the maxim goes, what you don’t know won’t hurt you. The Government says it does not know if there are arms aboard United States military flights stopping at Shannon Airport, which means the US can go on doing whatever it is doing on Irish soil en route to war fields.
It also says it is the Football Association of Ireland’s decision to play Israel in Dublin in autumn, thus shirking the onus to intervene before the national anthem of a state accused of crimes against humanity is played in Dublin.
Now it says it is unaware if alumina exported from Ireland is ending up in Russian weapons.
“I’m wondering what Irish neutrality actually means,” said Dutch MEP Bart Groothuis, one of many EU politicians demanding that alumina be included in the European Commission’s next package of Russian sanctions.
He is not the only one wondering. Ukrainians who fled here from Vladimir Putin’s war must be equally puzzled as Ireland starts withdrawing their State-provided accommodation. What part of a neutrality policy deems it non-partisan to refuse Ukraine weapons while discounting evidence that converted product from Ireland is ending up in the invader’s arsenal?
The Government has credible economic reasons to resist EU sanctions. The Askeaton plant, owned by a subsidiary of Russian conglomerate En+ Group, directly employs 475 people and provides incomes for hundreds of other contract and support workers. Any threatened unemployment is exacerbated by the recent closure of Wyeth’s baby milk-formula factory and the cessation of full operations at Moneypoint.
But the ethical choice between protecting jobs and protecting neutrality is overplayed and the Government is being utterly specious in its defence of Aughinish Alumina.
In his radio interview on Tuesday, Burke said figures the company gave the Central Statistics Office (CSO) were wrong and are to be corrected. Instead of 83 per cent of its alumina going to Russia in the first three months of this year, as it had said, the proportion was only 45 per cent. As if shipping only €48 million worth in three months, somehow, makes everything all right. As if that makes Ireland less not-neutral.
The EU has not sanctioned alumina because it considers it a crucial resource for the bloc. There is a pattern of successive Irish governments doing somersaults and cartwheels to stop a ban ever being imposed. The last time there was a risk of it, after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ireland intensively lobbied Brussels on behalf of the plant in the Shannon estuary.
This time, as Belgian foreign minister Maxime Prévot and Dubliner David O’Sullivan, the EU envoy for sanctions implementation, express worry that converted alumina from Ireland could be ending up in Russian weapons, Taoiseach Micheál Martin has warned that restrictions would be “devastating” for Aughinish and would do more harm to the EU than to Russia.
According to CSO data this newspaper published last Saturday, just 0.6 per cent of Aughinish’s total alumina exports in the first quarter of this year went to EU countries. It will be interesting to see the revised figure when the company corrects the information it provided. Will it also correct data for 2025 showing 66.8 per cent went to Russia?
Catastrophising has been the keynote in safeguarding Aughinish any time the spotlight falls on it, be it concerns about environmental damage or its Russian links.
The company has explicitly and implicitly warned the Government of all sorts of calamities if sanctions are imposed: from redundancies in the midwest to depleted national electricity supply and additional State costs in maintaining the gas grid.
All of which raises this riddle: if Russia accounts for nearly 40 per cent less of Aughinish’s exports than it previously reported, why would a ban be so catastrophic?
Something else niggles. Successive governments have treated Aughinish’s destiny as a case of all-or-nothing. There is scant public discussion about finding new markets and expanding existing ones, precisely what the Australian government did when it banned alumina exports to Russia after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine.
Leinster House is gearing up for a big ding-dong about the implications for neutrality in the Government’s Defence Bill dispensing with the UN Security Council mandate for overseas military missions.
This is while Israel’s flag is to run up the flagpole in Lansdowne Road, a warmongering US president is invited to visit Ireland for a jolly and an Irish product gets converted into material used by companies that supply Russia’s killing machinery in Ukraine.
It is time the people of this country decided by referendum what exactly we mean by neutrality, a constitutional value cherished by a majority of citizens as opinion polls consistently show.
Until then our friends in Europe will reasonably ask: What neutrality?
