Aughinish Alumina Needs Proper Domestic Debate

MEPs in the European Parliament voted yesterday to ‘ban alumina export to Russia’.

Of the Irish MEPs, Fine Gael, Sinn Féin, Labour and Independent MEP Luke ‘Ming’ Flanagan all indicated beforehand they would vote in favour. MEPs Michael McNamara and Ciarán Mullooly indicated they would vote against, while Fianna Fáil indicated they would abstain.

A campaign initially led by NAFO and a smattering of MEPs with track records of extreme positions has heaped intense pressure on the Irish government to lift its own veto in the Council of the European Union and allow exports from Aughinish Alumina in Co. Limerick to be sanctioned.

From the start, the momentum of this campaign has come from its foreign component – the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP), non-Irish MEPs, online NAFO accounts from god-knows-where, Kaja Kallas, Volodymyr Zelensky, and so on.

MEPs from a grab bag of EU countries have signed letters, a Lithuanian MEP showed up at the gates of Aughinish to take photos of himself and denounce it, Kaja Kallas raised the issue when she came to Ireland in early June, Zelensky urged the Irish government to take action when he was hosted in Dublin to mark the start of Ireland’s EU presidency.

NAFO is a decentralised online influence campaign, whose founder is a nazi who described as ‘based’ a man who ploughed his car through peaceful protesters in Portland during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020 - injuring three - and who tweeted approvingly about Hitler. Not all NAFOs are nazis with similar views, but enough are for it to be notable.

Kaja Kallas is, as almost everyone now recognises and most acknowledge, a dangerous idiot who is doing untold damage to the countries of the EU in matters of foreign affairs and diplomacy.

Many of the MEPs who have pushed this campaign are some of the most aggressively anti-diplomacy members of the European Parliament; people who constantly urge escalation against Russia despite the obvious dangers to the people of Ukraine and the EU of such a strategy.

And nobody seems to have asked the question in Ireland: Why now? Why the sudden focus on an alumina plant in Limerick that has been exporting alumina to Russia since 2022 without much comment? The Irish Times investigation co-published with the OCCRP (a non-Irish entity) in March didn’t tell anyone anything that they couldn’t have already known – alumina is exported to Russia, alumina is a material used in aluminium manufacture, Russia uses a proportion of its finished aluminium for weapons. It’s anything but revelatory. According to its most recently available annual report (2024) OCCRP’s donors include the UK Foreign Office, and the US State Department.

Alumina, meanwhile, is a commodity that is not currently listed as a dual-use item, and nearly 500 people work in Aughinish. No international laws are being broken by its export to Russia, though understandably for many people it feels wrong.

The quality of the discussion in Ireland on this matter has been staggeringly poor – with only vague gestures at nationalisation addressing the potential loss of those jobs if alumina exports are sanctioned. Under EU rules, Ireland may be required to re-privatise the plant within a set period if it nationalises (at a cost of how many millions or billions to the state?), as Germany is currently doing in the case of SEFE. Nobody seems to have asked who might buy Aughinish if it’s in effect force-sold because of being sanctioned. Rio Tinto seized control of Rusal’s 20% stake in Queensland Alumina Ltd. after the Australian government banned alumina exports to Russia in 2022. Nobody in Ireland who feels that it’s wrong for alumina to be exported from Aughinish to Russia appears to have asked the question of whether an effective sanction of Aughinish will lead to the plant being delivered into the hands of Rio Tinto or Alcoa or someone else who’ll just turn around and put the alumina into the supply chains for weapons for Israel or the United States. But if you play stupid geopolitics games, you win stupid prizes – which is exactly why Ireland has had a policy of neutrality for all of its history.

Fianna Fáil has said they will ‘support’ the ‘Commission’ if the Commission decides exports from Aughinish should be sanctioned. This is not a matter for the Commission. It is a matter for the Council, of which the Irish government is a member and in which it wields a veto. If alumina exports are sanctioned, it is the Irish government that will do it by lifting its veto, nobody else. Nobody in Irish politics appears to have pointed this out, even when Mícheál Martin claimed in the Dáil that ‘Europe decides what gets sanctioned and Europe decides what we do not put on the sanctions list,’ an egregiously false claim.

‘Europe’ doesn’t decide anything on sanctions, the Council of the European Union does. And the Irish government has a vote, and the Irish government has a veto. This is a domestic decision, with domestic consequences, and we shouldn’t be bounced into anything because Kaja Kallas is pressuring us to do it.

If Ireland needs to have a domestic debate about alumina exports to Russia, let it have a domestic debate about alumina exports. Perhaps some of the workers who face potential job losses could be invited in to the Oireachtas to discuss with TDs how these proposals will affect them. Perhaps the Oireachtas Committee on European Affairs and the Committee on Foreign Affairs and Defence could clarify with the government that it does indeed have a veto on this decision; perhaps they could discuss whether further escalatory moves against Russia are either wise or in Ireland’s interests in a context in which more and more powerful factions in the EU are calling for re-starting EU-Russia diplomacy. Perhaps we could have a discussion about who might be in line to buy Aughinish if it’s sanctioned and then sold off – and whether they have had any role in this campaign. Perhaps we could have a discussion about the terrible damage to the local environment wrought by Aughinish over the years, and whether a decision to sanction alumina exports to Russia will do anything to address that (it won’t). Perhaps we could have a discussion about whether this will do anything to stop the war in Ukraine (it won’t), something which should presumably be the most urgent task for anyone who claims to care about its people.

We could do all of this, but we’re not. Instead we have policy-making by vibes, energised by outside forces that have no care for or loyalty to the people of Ireland, and who won’t have to stick around to pick up the pieces if this all ends very badly.