Half the country’s fuel supply locked behind blockades, the Defence Forces called in, and the government writing a €505 million cheque in the hope that the problem would go away. It won’t. Ireland has no serious plan to get off fossil fuels.
The immediate trigger is clear enough. The US-Israeli war on Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and spiked global energy prices. Within days, Ireland’s dependence on imported fossil fuels was exposed for what it is: a structural vulnerability with no short-term fix. Hauliers, farmers, and agricultural contractors, the people who absorb fuel costs directly into their livelihoods, responded with the most disruptive protest movement the country has seen in a generation. Tommy Robinson and Katie Hopkins amplified the crisis from abroad. Conor McGregor seized on it to promote his warped right-wing vision for Ireland.
When the Taoiseach called the Whitegate refinery blockade “national sabotage,” he was not wrong about the consequences. But neither were the protestors wrong that they are being asked to bear costs they did not create. Their incomes depend on burning fossil fuels. There are no public transport or non-carbon machinery alternatives in much of rural Ireland. Almost all rural heating runs on oil and gas. The price shock hit people who had no EV to switch to, no heat pump already installed, no rail line within thirty kilometres. Agricultural contractors carry the financial risk of a system geared towards export-led dairy and beef, absorbing fuel costs, machinery loans, and seasonal volatility, while having almost no voice in the policy decisions that shape their livelihoods.
What both sides failed to confront is that the underlying problem is Ireland’s continued dependence on fossil fuels. It has been blindingly obvious for a decade that Ireland needs to treat investment in the grid and renewables on a warlike footing. Little has been done.
Decarbonisation is the central political problem of our time, and it is not unique to Ireland. In a new book, Growth, Democracy, or Climate Action? The New Trilemma of Advanced Capitalism (Agenda Publishing, 2026), co-authored with Hanna Schwander, Cyril Benoît, and Tim Vlandas, I argue that capitalist democracies face an inescapable trade-off between three objectives: sustaining economic growth, maintaining democratic legitimacy, and delivering serious climate action. They can pursue two. They cannot pursue all three.
The dominant approach across the OECD, what we call the Liberal Status Quo, tries to square the circle through carbon pricing, technology subsidies, and voluntary corporate commitments. It keeps growth and democracy intact, but quietly sacrifices climate action. The Inflation Reduction Act was torn up by Trump. The European Green Deal is being rolled back. Corporate lawfare obstructs regulation in court after court. The Liberal Status Quo avoids the distributional conflict that decarbonisation requires. That is its defining feature.
The alternative, the Big Green State, works on delivery. China invested nearly a trillion dollars in clean energy last year and controls 80 per cent of global solar production. But green capacity is layered on top of fossil fuels, not replacing them. And China can do this precisely because it is not a democracy. Planning without a majoritarian coalition, as any Irish Green Party member will tell you, does not survive an election cycle.
The third option, degrowth, is scientifically coherent but politically marginal. No advanced democracy has ever elected a degrowth platform. Capitalist democracies promise the aspiration of more, not less. To run on a platform of less is to lose.
What all three positions share is a refusal to take politics seriously. Each externalises the hard question. Markets will sort it out. Experts will sort it out. The science will sort it out. None grapples with who loses, who decides, and how power is exercised through party competition and electoral coalitions.
The fuel protests are a case study in what fills that vacuum. The far right has understood the politics of climate faster than the left. It has framed climate policy as an elite project that punishes ordinary people. Gilets jaunes, the Dutch BBB, the AfD, MAGA. And now, on the M50 and at Whitegate, in Ireland too. The international far right found an audience in rural Ireland inside seventy-two hours.
But here is the structural irony. The data on carbon inequality, produced by Lucas Chancel at the World Inequality Lab, shows that in every advanced democracy the bottom 50 per cent of the population is already at or near the per-capita emissions target for 2030. The top 10 per cent need to cut by roughly 90 per cent. The top 1 per cent, who emit over 100 tonnes of CO₂ per person per year, need to cut by close to 100 per cent. Carbon inequality is not a footnote. It is the central distributive question of the century.
The protestors blocking Whitegate are not the climate problem. Their dependence on fossil fuels is the consequence of decades of policy failure: no rural public transport, no domestic energy security, no serious retrofit programme, no alternative that makes the transition materially attractive to the people being asked to bear it.
The trilemma cannot be wished away. But its sharpest edges can be managed. That requires rebuilding the planning capacities that democracies dismantled under neoliberalism, confronting concentrated corporate power, and ensuring the wealthy shoulder the greatest costs. We call this “degrowth for the rich, green growth for the rest.” It is the only distributive frame that can hold a democratic majority.
If progressive parties cannot build that coalition, the far right will keep offering the alternative: protection from the transition, rather than participation in it. That road leads somewhere much darker than a blocked motorway.
Leave a Reply