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Una Mullally: State’s red-carpet welcome for Amazon is embarrassing

In other cities around the world, people protest the prospect of company arriving

An Amazon employee sorts items into the waiting robots at the company’s facility on Staten Island in New York. Photograph: Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Una Mullally's face
Una Mullally
Mon Sep 13 2021 - 01:00

The news that Amazon is to build a mega-warehouse in Ireland is depressing on multiple fronts. Get ready for a cycle of stories about Amazon’s abhorrent record on workers’ rights, and its horrific attitude towards waste, destroying millions and millions of new and unused products every year.

At one warehouse in the United Kingdom, an ex-employee told ITV in June that they were instructed to destroy 130,000 items a week. That was a target. The beast of hyper-consumption is eating itself and now Ireland has invited it in to sharpen its choppers here.

The role of the consumer in all of this is important, but the role of industry dwarves it. We must as a society tackle the disconnect in people’s psyches between manufacturing, selling and delivery. It’s bad enough that so many people don’t care about how their products are made or who makes them, but now they want them delivered on the same day. For people who protest that they’re busy or live in a remote area or have some other need for convenience, well, there are other websites you can order from, ones that don’t result in workers peeing in bottles while their boss takes a penis-shaped rocket towards the outer atmosphere.

The Amazon system, globally, is a disaster for independent, local retailers, and no amount of PR about the benefits of 'joining their platform' can spin that

But we can’t tackle that disconnect if Government tries to convince itself and everyone else that Amazon mega-warehouses are logical, reasonable, important things. That this is normal. That this is progress. That this is something we should aspire to be part of and to facilitate. It’s so incredibly regressive. Is this really what Ireland wants? Is this who we want to be or even just be seen as? Ireland as the underbelly of tax-shirking big tech is a reputation we now own. That’s what we’ve become known for. All of this will be hard to unpick. Entities such as Amazon don’t grow, they metastasise.

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Independent retailers in Ireland have had an incredibly testing time since the country first locked down in March 2020. Many of them adapted and were able to develop their online businesses. But even if you were able to weather the storm (so far), even if your social media game was flying and you rallied a community of customers to support you through such a difficult time, and used the small amounts of money coming from Government to pay the rent, the strain and scarring is huge, not to mention all of the time, work, energy, innovation and resources it took to actually get through lockdowns. Some have not made it. Some have made it so far but the reality is retailers – and plenty of other businesses – will be sifting through the wreckage of debt, arrears, staffing shortages and lost custom for a long time to come.

All the while, we’ve been told: shop local, support local. Clearly, when those mantras pour from Government politicians’ mouths, it’s pure lip service. You cannot be a supporter of Irish retailers and Amazon simultaneously. The Amazon system, globally, is a disaster for independent, local retailers, and no amount of PR about the benefits of “joining their platform” can spin that.

“Amazon’s ongoing commitment to Ireland is most welcome,” said Martin Shanahan of the IDA. Most welcome to whom exactly? Amazon? The lowest common denominator retort to reasonable criticisms about the ethics and behaviours of companies such as Amazon is the blunt and basic imagination-stopper: “jobs”. There’s rarely a discussion about what kinds of jobs. The Government bangs on about our great tech company jobs but never when it’s about the torrid work of moderators, for example, another part of Ireland’s big tech underbelly.

Want jobs? Well some people, given the opportunity, would have plenty of ideas about how to create sustainable, well-paid jobs that gave people a sense of purpose, security, and afforded them a decent quality of life. But the Government’s imagination rarely gets out of the traps and constantly looks elsewhere for answers, while talented people find it hard to be enabled and emigrate.

Ireland has indeed become a graveyard for late-stage tech-capitalism, data and 'fulfilment' centres jostling to clutter a landscape that our Government clearly does not value beyond a commodity

Parts of Ireland could be large co-operatively owned organic farms with abundant forestry instead of industrial-scale animal exporters masquerading as “agriculture”. We could have sustainable housing and indigenous industry but instead we’re bleeding our land dry with the Government’s insatiable drive for short-term, unethical nonsense. It’s embarrassing. In other cities around the world, people protest the prospect of Amazon arriving. Here, the IDA and the Government roll out the red carpet.

There’s a Brian Friel play called The Mundy Scheme – not one of his most successful, but it has often popped into my head over the past decade. In The Mundy Scheme, Ireland is falling apart financially, but a new leader and cabinet minister devise a plan for guaranteed prosperity, selling land in the west of Ireland as burial ground for North America’s dead.

The thinking is that all around the world, valuable urban land is used for graveyards, so why not use Ireland’s “valueless” land instead? In this satire, Friel envisaged Ireland as a dumping ground for what was too expensive elsewhere. Ireland has indeed become a graveyard for late-stage tech-capitalism, data and “fulfilment” centres jostling to clutter a landscape that our Government clearly does not value beyond a commodity.

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