Rundale

Patrick Bresnihan and Rory Rowan

As winter sets in, many households across Ireland face months of making tough choices between heating their homes and meeting other basic needs. Between 2022 and 2024 the last government tempered the cost of living crisis and skyrocketing energy prices by subsidising household energy bills – in effect an enormous transfer of public money into energy companies’ pockets. But once the coalition was re-elected, ‘prudent Paschal’ abandoned these emergency measures before himself abandoning the government for the World Bank. That these costly measures made no structural difference to the country’s energy crisis underlines just how socially and ecologically unsustainable our current energy system is. 

Irish media commentators often claim that Ireland could become ‘the Saudi Arabia of green energy’. This line refers of course to the enormous potential energy that exists off Ireland’s coast in the form of Atlantic winds. If only we could harness this energy, the argument goes, we could free ourselves from dependency on expensive imported gas and generate enormous wealth as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states have done through oil. 

Simplistic narratives like this might attract clicks and comment, but they reduce discussions over energy to a series of idealistic postures and technical promises completely divorced from any contextual understanding of why certain forms of energy are developed rather than others, who benefits from these developments, and how their social and ecological costs are externalised and, in turn, resisted. 

Much academic research and analysis on energy transitions in Ireland is characterised by similar limitations. The field is dominated by the disciplines of engineering and economics, with social sciences usually relegated to mapping attitudes, awareness, and behavioural change, with an eye to bringing publics along with top-down, developer-led infrastructure projects. 

The four articles collected in this ‘special issue’ offer something different. While focused on different topics and offering different perspectives, they all bring a materialist analysis to the questions of energy transition. A materialist analysis moves us away from how we would like things to be (based on emissions targets, units of potential energy generation, or other abstract metrics) towards how the world actually works, both ecologically and politically. 

Throughout this issue emphasis falls on the political dimensions of energy transitions. This means examining the interplay of conflicting interests, the role of state and corporate power, histories of uneven development, and the tensions between different relations to land, resources, and technology. Without a political ecology that connects, for example, the Tokyo HQ of Toyota to the EV engines on Irish roads and the emissions targets driving Irish climate policy, we cannot have constructive discussions about the possibilities for a just and sustainable energy transition in Ireland. 

Dependency 

To understand the current realities of Ireland’s energy system and the possibilities for just and sustainable alternatives, it is crucial to locate the country within the capitalist world system. This framework helps us understand how the world is systematically and unequally structured into core countries, that are capital and industry intensive, and peripheral and semi-peripheral countries that provide labour and resources to feed the development of core countries.

When we situate Ireland within the capitalist world-system it quickly becomes apparent that it is a ‘semi-periphery’, structurally dependent on ‘core’ states and their industrial sectors. That Ireland is dependent on international  investment, particularly US capital, is of course no secret to anyone in Ireland, but the history, nature, and stakes of that dependency are rarely examined or challenged. Indeed, Ireland’s dependence on foreign direct investment is an unquestionable article of faith largely quarantined from critical analysis. 

Ireland’s dependent status is, in our view, at the very core of the problems Irish society faces, including the interrelated energy and climate crises, and the state’s unwillingness and inability to take the action needed to address them. 

Conchúr O Mhaonaigh’s article on Ireland’s EV dependency cuts to the heart of these relations by showing how Ireland’s ‘domestic’ EV transition is fundamentally determined by interests and decisions made outside of the country. Ireland does not design, own, or control any of the components of EV technology and hence we are dependent on core, industrially advanced nations (such as the US, Japan, Germany, and  China) and their automobile industries, as well as the global supply chains that support them. 

Ireland cannot develop some kind of national self-sufficiency in EV production or a domestic EV market on its own. Yet, the structural conditions of dependency that shape Ireland’s relationships to the globalised EV industry, and the consequences they have for making decisions about energy transition, are rarely subjected to any analytic scrutiny and the political stakes are consistently avoided. 

Adam Stoneman’s article on the development of the Ardnacrusha power plant in County Clare points to the question of what sovereign infrastructural development might look like for Ireland today. When the fledgling Irish Free State was not able to attract US investment for an energy project that didn’t promise profits it set out to develop the project itself by establishing a new institutional form – a national, public utility. Although it was built by German engineers Ardnacrusha was at its core a nation-building project, owned as a public utility and built to generate electricity to drive development and improve lives. 

As Adam rightly points out, we shouldn’t be too misty-eyed about Ardnacrusha, with historians documenting the labour exploitation and ecological devastation involved in its construction. Yet as problematic and contradictory as Ardnacrusha was, it gave practical expression to a vision of sovereign development – utilising indigenous resources to facilitate social and industrial development in a country that had been purposefully under-developed for centuries under British imperial rule. 

Today, infrastructural development is again at the very centre of political debate, with offshore wind projects, the long-delayed metrolink plan, new gas infrastructure, and the National Development Plan review occupying headlines just last week alone. Ardnacrusha is frequently evoked in these discussions. However, whether its data centres, wind farms, or EVs, the design, purpose, and control of these technologies is far removed from any idea of public ownership and in many cases detached from social need. 

It has become common, for example, for tech industry representatives to call for a ‘new Ardnacrusha’ to power more data centres. But who would such infrastructure serve? A ‘new Ardnacrusha’ for AI might involve state investment and intervention but it would deepen Ireland’s dependency on US monopoly tech, rather than meeting societal needs and climate goals. This typifies the state’s current development strategies where public benefit is not the primary goal but a possible spin-off from servicing corporate interests.  

Capitalist Contradictions

Niamh Donnelly’s article highlights how contradictions emerge in existing industry-led energy transition projects between investor profits on the one hand and social need on the other. Niamh points to the problems that have emerged along with the expanding use of biogas as a clean energy source in rural Ireland. However, these problems are not inherent to biogas as such but rather arise because the technology is introduced as a means to resolve contradictions in the capitalist agricultural system, which is producing increasing volumes of waste whilst supporting increasingly few rural livelihoods. As Niamh shows, attempting to use biogas for this purpose threatens to introduce new contradictions by producing inequalities in the distribution of Biogas’ costs, whilst reorganising land and labour around energy markets and deepening infrastructural lock-in to fossil fuels in the guise of green energy. 

As Niamh points out, none of the above is inevitable but becomes structurally more likely when timelines and targets for industrial change intersect with a liberalised, financialised energy system. The Irish state has positioned itself as a market-maker in the green energy sector rather than as a resource manager and public utility provider. The state lubricates investment – providing regulatory architectures and de-risking investments – and then lets private capital lead the process on its own terms, i.e., maximising profits. 

In a policy context where market competition is the preferred means of achieving policy goals, and private organisations whose principal interest is profit lead in developing infrastructure, it is clear that neither social need nor environmental sustainability will be prioritised. In such a system anything that limits businesses’ capacity to maximise profit will be jettisoned at the earliest opportunity. 

Indeed, Europe is currently undergoing a massive drive towards deregulation, that would see rules put in place to protect the public interest rolled back, in everything from workers’ rights to environmental standards, in the name of “competitiveness”, or what our very own homegrown tech-bro evangelists frame as plain old ‘getting things done’. In Ireland, Minister Jack Chambers has promised to introduce plans to radically overhaul the planning system, including “emergency powers that seek to go to the edge of what’s legally and constitutionally possible to rebalance rights in the Irish economy,” limiting avenues for public objection to industry-led development. 

Democratic Planning 

We are not against technology or industry. Indeed, it is very clear that we urgently need massive technological and industrial change, not least within the energy sector, if we are to transition to more just and sustainable modes of living together, in Ireland and globally. Our questions rather concern how industry is developed, where, and crucially for whom and for what. Central to these concerns is the matter of the democratic control of technology and industry. 

Whilst ‘community owned infrastructure’ holds promise it is not sufficient on its own. Ireland’s experiments with community owned energy can be numbered on one hand. The failure for such projects to gain any foothold in our energy transition is not due to a lack of community engagement but because the resources and the institutional and technical capacity required to develop socially owned energy projects at scale are beyond what communities can muster without substantial state support. Hence, the question of energy transition raises fundamental questions about the role of the state in relation to meeting social and ecological needs.

We recognise the value of attempts to set up sustainable models of meeting social needs beyond the reach of the state, and they have been important seed-beds for ideas and practices. However, contemporary crises demand we move beyond vulnerable islands of prefigurative practice towards systemic change that is scalable and capable of addressing the needs and engaging the energies of our diverse communities. We do not pretend to know what this looks like but it must, in our view, involve harnessing the organisational capacities of the state and wresting democratic control away from market actors and institutional structures designed to confine the work of government to securing their interests. 

Throughout the decades of neoliberal dominance, when locating markets at the heart of governance was understood to not only be desirable but necessary, Ireland has been one of its most lustrous exemplars. Even before the neoliberal revolution began in earnest with the CIA-backed coup in Chile in 1973, the Irish state had fundamentally oriented itself around attracting and servicing international capital. The fusion of industrial development strategy and foreign policy, produced and gave expression to, what Bresnihan and Brodie have called, “FDI nationalism” – an ideological framework in which the interests of US capital are synonymous with those of the Irish state. 

In Ireland, it grows ever more clear that the democratisation of planning must involve some degree of delinking from the conditions of dependency that restrict our capacity to prioritise social and ecological needs. In other words, democratic planning in Ireland requires departing from the existing economic model dominated by US capital investment. When even democratic initiatives like renaming public parks are blocked by the US there is little hope of having democratic control over energy transition. 

Political discourse in Ireland is filled with portends about the period of geopolitical instability we are entering into. The government warns us that we must be prepared to discipline ourselves to maintain our position of privileged dependency. Yet if we direct our attention beyond the ‘West’ we see not only the loss of ordering assumptions but the emergence of developmental pathways that exceed the constraints set by the Pentagon and Palo Alto. If we are bold enough we might look elsewhere to see Ireland otherwise. 

We need a politics mature enough to clearly state that the contradictions of capitalist development can only be resolved by removing development from the contradictions of capitalism.