As of April 16, the International Energy Agency reported that Europe has around six weeks left of jet fuel amid the ongoing war on Iran. This comes on the heels of a seven-day long blockade of major roadways by a decentralized coalition of farmers, truckers, agricultural contractors, and others in protest of skyrocketing fuel prices in Ireland. The country grinded to a halt as protesters also blockaded major fuel depots such as those in Galway and County Limerick, with RTÉ reporting that 600 fueling stations ran out of diesel and gas as of April 11. Protesters’ demands were for immediate relief: a cap on fuel prices or cuts to excise duties, VAT, or carbon taxes. Effects of rising fuel prices are rippling across the globe as the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran continues unabated, but just as in the U.S., rising fuel prices in Ireland are only a symptom of greater converging crises.
Soaring cost of living, lack of health care access, and a fragile food system within Ireland have contributed to a rise in anti-immigrant rhetoric and other far right ideologies, culminating in multiple eruptions of violence across the island. These eruptions, from 2023 to 2025, were met with little intervention from the state, unlike the current fuel protests — a sign that just like in the U.S., state repression will always disproportionately come for those in direct opposition to power.
Standoffs between the Irish police (Garda Síochána) and protesters occurred at the Whitegate refinery, Ireland’s only oil refinery, culminating in several arrests and scuffles. Irish Minister for Justice Jim O’Callaghan called the protests the result of “outside actors” of the far right using the people for their own agenda, stating that figures like prominent U.K. far right activist Tommy Robinson (also known as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) are taking advantage of the Irish people’s dissatisfaction: “I know the overwhelming majority of people protesting do not want to see themselves manipulated by people like Tommy Robinson.” However, O’Callaghan also threatened the use of the Irish Defence Forces to quell the protests. Meanwhile, Taoiseach Micheál Martin, Ireland’s equivalent of a prime minister, called the blockades an unacceptable form of protest on RTÉ Radio 1. He said that protesters should “channel” their issues through various organizations. Such responses only solidified Irish support for the protests across social media.
“The level of disruption achieved by the fuel protests is precisely what we need for the Palestine solidarity movement,” Laura Fitzgerald of the Ireland-based ROSA Socialist Feminist Movement told Truthout in an interview, “and from a working-class-led movement from below on the cost of living crisis.”
The fuel protests emerged from social media and WhatsApp groups, but Fitzgerald says those involved were not exactly a diverse cross-section of the Irish working-class. Still, 56 percent of the population supported the efforts. “Those involved in the protests were mainly medium business people … Despite all of this, the fact that the support they received was so broad is indicative of the generalized cost-of-living crisis and how it’s affecting almost everyone, bar the very elite in society.”
Fitzgerald also said two of the so-called spokespeople that have emerged in the media “are the last people who should be given a platform.” According to multiple outlets, farmers Christopher Duffy and James Geoghegan have both espoused right-wing rhetoric on many issues online. Duffy has spouted anti-immigrant rhetoric and also made comments regarding sexual assault toward environmental activist Greta Thunberg. Geoghegan, while also posting misinformation about green policies online, has been convicted of animal cruelty.
While some are trying to take advantage of such political momentum to push forward their far right agendas, other organizations and leftists in Ireland are refusing to allow working-class unity to be co-opted. Common themes include pointing out that many of these issues are the result of U.S. greed and empire, and the Irish government’s complicity in it. Community Action Tenants Union (CATU) Ireland said in a statement: “CATU believes we need to unite in support of demands that remove the power that the private market has over our lives and services … The real root of the current crisis is Government greed and neglect, not in our neighbors and fellow workers.” Irish comedian and poet Aoife Dunne, who has experienced years of targeted online harassment from the right, wrote on Instagram: “You cannot support the US and then complain about oil prices. You cannot complain about migration and fuel etc and not denounce what the US and Russia and Isra[e]l and beyond are doing.”
Even as a “neutral” country, Ireland does have financial and military ties to the U.S. Many protests have erupted at Shannon Airport in response to the war on Gaza, as U.S. military planes continued making stops in the country on the way to Israel. Even during the fuel protests, there were two major actions at the airport: One in which a man climbed on top of a U.S. military aircraft and took a hatchet to the exterior, and 91-year-old Lelia Doolan’s 220-kilometer walk from Clare to the Dáil (the lower house of the Oireachtas, or parliament) in Dublin in protest of U.S. military usage of the airport. This unfettered access continues despite other U.S. allies like Spain and Poland refusing some U.S. demands for military assistance in Iran.
These protests came as recent political efforts from the government have attempted to dissolve the Irish “triple lock,” which dictates that Ireland must have UN approval, a decision by the government, and a vote in the Dáil to send Irish troops abroad on “peacekeeping missions.” Championed by Tánaiste Simon Harris and others in the cabinet, the changes would rescind the necessity of UN approval as well as eliminate the requirement for Dáil resolutions in certain cases. Per a report by The Journal, “The Government argues that this removes the power of UN Security Council permanent members, such as Russia, to veto Ireland’s national sovereign decisions, while also ‘ensuring our continued compliance with the highest standards of international law.’” Antiwar protesters gathered in Dublin on April 18 to highlight the importance of the triple lock to Irish neutrality on the world stage.
Also notable is that the Irish government is currently in a deal to purchase €600 million worth of armored vehicles from France — an effort that would “transform the Irish Army from a light infantry force, with limited armoured elements, to a largely mechanised force equipped with modern armour and heavier weaponry,” according to The Irish Times. Coupled with the Irish government’s responses to the current protests, this is cause for concern, and it comes straight out of an American-style playbook for suppressing political dissent.
On March 26, the Irish Network of Legal Observers, established by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL), released a report documenting the policing of protests in 2025. While it found that most protests were policed in a “human rights compliant” manner, it also showed some escalating trends, such as Gardaí removing their own identification and increased response “near sites of infrastructural significance.” It is important to note that the Gardaí are not as heavily militarized as police in the U.S., and they have powers to disperse protesters and traffic obstructions, according to ICCL in a statement about the fuel protests on April 9. However, the ICCL also noted that the threats to deploy the Defence Forces are “a significant step and does raise serious concerns for the protection of peaceful protest in Ireland, and the relationship between the public and the State.”
But while Ireland does seem to be teetering further toward U.S.-style militarization of the state, the groundswell of solidarity and the people’s staunch refusal to be divided by those in power is clear. Amid the fuel protests, charity organization Muslim Sisters of Éire experienced hostilities from individuals carrying the Irish tri-color flag after distributing food at the Dublin General Post Office (which headquartered the Easter Rising of 1916). In a post on Instagram, the organization wrote: “Providing 300 meals to those in need only to be met with hate is sickening. But let it be known: we remain undeterred.”
People Before Profit, an eco-socialist political party within Ireland, called on the Irish people to reject far right ideologues being spotlighted by the protests and to build a bigger movement. “The anger on the streets is real and justified,” it said in a statement on April 12. “But a movement … with far-right figures hovering at its edges, cannot win the demands that working people actually need. We must demand that our unions enter the fight. Workers did not cause this crisis. Energy companies, war-makers and a government that serves corporate interests did.”
As the protests and blockades have been dispersed, and the government has announced €505 million in support for farmers and the transport and fisheries sectors, the fight continues. Fitzgerald says that the package is unlikely to make it to the relief of actual working people and echoes calls for a united working-class movement: “Any movement on fuel prices and cost of living will fall at the first hurdle if it doesn’t recognize the need to unite against both the government and political establishment in Ireland, and against U.S. imperialism.”
Meanwhile, Sinn Féin, an Irish republican and democratic socialist party, put forth a vote of no-confidence in the current government on April 14. The vote went in favor of the government.
The current political climate in Ireland represents a precipice — one in which too much air is given to the ideas that let a state complicit in violence off the hook for the converging crises that come through warmongering. The Irish government, like the U.S. government, wants people to return to “business as usual” while Donald Trump holds the world hostage to mass destruction and death. “Never before have the pitfalls of the Irish state’s alliance with Western imperialism, its complicity with genocide, its protection of the interests of fossil capital been laid so bare for the world to see,” wrote Clara McCormack in an analysis for Rebel News.
Fitzgerald wants the left to harness the momentum of this moment to address cost of living as well as public housing and shifting from fossil fuels: “We need a national strike action that mobilizes the power of workers withdrawing their labor to force government action … such a movement will need feminism and anti-racism threaded through it — and could provide real leadership and hope that’s so desperately needed.”


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