The Irish artist Spicebag, whose real name is Adam Doyle, caused a moral panic among centrist sorts in Ireland a few years back, after one of his artworks, which pointed towards the Irish police force’s complicity in a spate of evictions that were taking place at the time, went viral. “It’s a proper gerontocracy,” Spicebag tells me, “where the wealth is essentially consolidated by the property-owning older people and also hedge funds, investment funds, tech companies and their enablers in the coalition [government]. Everyone else is kind of stuck. The GDP keeps rising, as other things are continuously thrown overboard. Previous guarantees, like being able to own a home or have children or be able to afford a car—stuff like that has been jettisoned to push that number up. People are being forced to leave or live with their parents. The impact of that is going to be very, very deep.
“If you’re at home with your ma and da, you’ve essentially had your right to have a child removed.”
The housing situation in Ireland has bred a dark air of resentment in the country, which has, in recent years, bubbled over into violence. Anti-immigrant race riots have broken out, while buildings intended to house asylum seekers are routinely targeted and burnt to the ground. The far right, as it does everywhere, feeds off despair, and the Irish economy is producing plenty of that.
“There’s polarization around housing,” says Spicebag, “and that’s driven up by the multinational companies coming in and importing workforces that need to be housed, on whatever they’re on—these crazy salaries that drive up [rent]. This sort of terraforms areas of Dublin for them and pushes the locals out to the fringe, which results in this resentment that you see bubbling up during the riots.”
It was not too long ago that Ireland was a literal colony of Britain, and it is difficult to escape the sense that, structurally, it has yet to truly move on. The government seeks only to offer the country up to foreign exploitation, while, at best, offering the actual public of Ireland the bare minimum to keep them ticking along and pliant. Consider Ireland’s recent emergence as a global hub of data centers, a trend which has been actively encouraged by the government. Data centers are facilities for the storage and processing of vast amounts of data—essentially the physical infrastructure behind what we call “the cloud”—and, in Ireland, many are owned and operated by the major American tech giants, like Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook and Google. The problem is that they require huge amounts of water and electricity in order to function.
It does genuinely rain all the fucking time in Ireland, so the appeal of building water-thirsty data centers there is clear enough. But even though the country does have one of the highest rates of water availability in Europe, it is nonetheless struggling to meet the population’s water demands, in no small part due to the underfunded, creaking infrastructure presently in place. Individual data centers can require the same amount of water as entire towns, so, if and when a dry period sets in on the country down the line, these centers are going to create a great deal more pressure on supply. People may literally go thirsty for these things.
The pressure on the electricity grid will be no less severe. Some projections claim about a third of Ireland’s electricity will, by 2026, be used by data centers, which, in a country already struggling with the high costs of energy following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, could drive prices even higher. Not only that, but the vulnerability of Ireland’s electricity system was made apparent when a massive storm in January smashed into the island and left a third of households without electricity, some of which didn’t get it back for two weeks. As the climate continues to break down, such storms are going to become more common, and the state is clearly unprepared to deal with them. Surely the last thing that needs to happen, then, is adding more unnecessary pressure to the grid. Some data center operators, such as Amazon, have committed to building wind farms to generate electricity for these data centers, green-washing the exercise, but such projects essentially amount to the capture of Irish land by foreign corporations. It is primarily they that will benefit from the land and its resources, not the people.
The Irish government has learned that tooling the economy to serve foreign corporations comes with certain benefits, largely to be enjoyed by a small few. It is a lesson which, in part, can be traced to a strange little town in the west of the country called Shannon. While it’s only home to about 10,000 people and an airport, this place has an outsized imprint on the rest of the world, for it was here, in Shannon, that the first modern special economic zone (SEZ) was established in 1959.
The Shannon Free Zone, as it’s called, is a business park carved out of a square mile of land, where the ordinary laws and regulations governing Ireland were effectively suspended. This meant, in practice, that foreign companies could avail of generous tax incentives by setting up there, which, indeed, saw a flood of investment into the area. This model has since been exported all over the world, most notably to China, where special economic zones are credited with transforming the economy into the behemoth it is today, but not all SEZs benefit the countries within which they are hosted. The conditions necessarily fostered within them—low corporate tax rates, poor labor standards, deregulation—can, in fact, prove very damaging.
With the spread of special economic zones around the world, and with Ireland as a whole having since transformed into something like a country-wide SEZ, the significance of the Shannon Free Zone is less obvious than it was during the second half of the 20th century. But, far from slipping from relevance, the town today boasts another significant role in the U.S.-led global system. Ever since the United States launched its War on Terror in 2001, Shannon Airport has been utilized as a de facto American military base.
Millions of U.S. troops are believed to have passed through Shannon over the years, on their way to fight illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the CIA, too, has allegedly touched down there to refuel on its “extraordinary rendition” flights, where “illegal combatants” are abducted and brought to secret black sites for interrogation and, perhaps, torture. Ireland, then, has been complicit in some extreme crimes of American imperialism. The situation has not changed much in the more than two decades since the start of the War on Terror, as reporting from the Irish news outlet The Ditch has repeatedly shown of late. Shannon Airport continues to be used by the American military today, even playing a role in Israel’s war on Gaza—despite the Irish public’s overwhelming support for the Palestinian cause.
“The state has always denied that anything untoward is happening,” Paulie Doyle, an investigative journalist for The Ditch, told me last week over a Zoom call. “But, after October 2023, we started taking a closer look at the U.S. military in Ireland and Shannon Airport. We discovered that, completely separately from the U.S. military using Shannon, commercial cargo airlines fly tons and tons of munitions through Irish sovereign airspace for use in Gaza. All while the State was saying that this wasn’t happening.
“These are household names. Companies like Lufthansa that are doing this. They’re just flying through Irish airspace. Complete contravention of Irish law, carrying weapons that could be used by an army that is before the international courts of justice facing genocide charges,” he said.
Doyle asserted that “the Irish government is so frightened of the United States that it’s not even willing to enforce its own laws on commercial companies. There were times last year when we found out that planes were leaving the United States packed with weapons. We called the Department of Transport, and we told them there’s a flight packed with weapons that’s heading for Irish sovereign airspace. What are you going to do about it? They did nothing. It’s very, very straightforward to prosecute these airlines. But the State doesn’t want to do it.”
The reason is quite simple. When Ireland acts in a way that the United States doesn’t like, it is liable to be pressured by both the U.S. and Israel to fall in line. There has, for instance, long been tensions over a proposed piece of legislation called the Occupied Territories Bill, which, for the last seven years now, has been trapped in limbo by an Irish government unwilling to implement it. If passed, the bill would ban trade between Ireland and Israel’s illegal settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territories, but, as The Ditch revealed last year, it has been communicated to the government, quite clearly, that this would be a mistake.
According to The Ditch’s reporting, the U.S. ambassador to Ireland, Claire Cronin, sent an email to senior members of the Irish government, warning that there would be “consequences” should they actually implement the Occupied Territories Bill. Ninety minutes later, Micheál Martin—the man presently serving as the taoiseach—released a statement, stating that the bill, rather than being enacted, would instead be reviewed.
“If you read the email,” laughs Doyle, “it’s quite clearly a threat. It sounds vaguely like the Mafia or something. ‘Nice economy, would be a shame if something were to happen to it.’”
Ireland is, officially, a militarily neutral country, which, given the ways it serves the American military, is clearly not entirely true in practice. All the same, the country’s rhetorical commitment to neutrality, which is overwhelmingly supported by the public, has not been for nothing, helping to establish Ireland as an advocate for diplomacy and conflict resolution on the world stage. But, as the drums of war beat throughout Europe, and as centrist politicians and op-ed writers excitedly bleat about the need to militarize, Irish neutrality is on the verge of being torn up. There is a mechanism within Irish politics, known as the “triple lock,” which ensures that, in order for Ireland to send more than twelve soldiers into a war zone, it must seek approval by the United Nations. The government is trying to break that obligation.
“We’re being told that the triple lock is an unacceptable surrender of Irish sovereignty,” says Doyle, “because we have to go to the United Nations General Assembly to seek approval to deploy more than twelve troops abroad. Right. That’s unacceptable surrender of Irish sovereignty, yet we’re letting the U.S. government determine how we respond to what the International Court of Justice says is credibly, possibly a genocide. There’s a complete contradiction there,” Doyle said. “It’s because we are economically subordinate to the United States to the extent that I would say our sovereignty is compromised. If you can’t formulate your own independent foreign policy, then how are you in any way a sovereign country? I would say that we are, in that regard, a de facto U.S. colony. When push comes to shove, Washington tells our politicians what they can and cannot do.”
Irish neutrality, imperfect as it was, looks set to be sacrificed, as the country’s leaders succumb to the swirling madness and paranoia sweeping through Europe, while its subordination to American military interests is likely to remain fixed in place. But, as Doyle points out, none of this is inevitable. The Irish government could take measures to stand up for itself, if it truly wanted to.
“They could enact the Occupied Territories Bill, for example,” he says. “They could go after and criminally prosecute these commercial cargo airlines that are unlawfully bringing weapons through Irish sovereign airspace. They could have boycotted the visit to Washington this year. They could have not adopted the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, which states that calling the state of Israel a racist endeavor constitutes bigotry against Jewish people. They could end the U.S. military use of Shannon. There are lots of steps that they could do if they were interested. But they’re not, because what they’re interested in is aligning us [with the U.S.].”
This is what it means to live in a vassal state, within a larger bloc which is itself vassalized. The European Union may present its drive towards militarization as a sign that it is standing on its own two feet at last, breaking its reliance on U.S. might, but is this not precisely what Trump wanted? He makes his demands for increased military spending in Europe, and, sure enough, the bloc dutifully does as it’s told, dragging little old Ireland along with it.
So Irish neutrality will be destroyed. Its feeble welfare state will likely be hollowed out and more money pumped into defense, where, in all likelihood, it will be wasted. The government will do as it’s told, be it by Brussels or by Washington, and it will do what it can to prop up its corrupted economy for as long as possible, bending to the whims of its corporate overlords and the American presidency. As for the people of Ireland struggling to keep roofs over their heads, perhaps the myth of national sovereignty will be enough to keep them happy for a little while longer yet, even as the society frays and breaks apart. Or, maybe not. Perhaps the illusion is broken now, and it is the far right, falsely claiming to represent the interests of the people, who will benefit most from it.
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