Rundale

Patrick Bresnihan

Shannon Industrial Estate in the 1960s. Source: roundaboutshannon.clareheritage.org

Ireland’s economy is apparently booming thanks to record corporation tax returns, and yet there has never been so many people without homes, energy bills are the highest in the EU, and there are chronic shortages of GPs and childcare places. Little wonder that there is now a flurry of mainstream commentators and social media influencers seeking to explain these discrepancies.

Fundamental distortions in Ireland’s development model need to be explained. The problem is that most explanations rarely get beyond a parochial nationalism, superficial understanding of history, and an over-inflated concern with policy and party politics, rather than economic structures and class. We are left with frustratingly inadequate comparisons between Ireland and Western European countries with histories of a strong welfare state, an industrial base, and colonial territories that provided cheap resources, labour and markets (or at least: countries that escaped centuries of de-development via colonisation).

The upshot of this bland analysis is that Ireland’s infrastructural deficits, despite strong foreign investment and corporate tax, are blamed on incompetence in our political system and the cultural foundations it presumably rests on (nepotism, localism, atavism, etc.). This story is as old as colonialism: the Irish, like all colonial subjects, were long understood to be incapable of governing their own affairs. Once formal independence arrived, the continued underdevelopment of former colonies only appears to confirm what the colonisers always believed.

What this story ignores, and certainly fails to address, is the unequal structure of the capitalist world system, a hierarchy of countries and territories that enables accumulation in the core and de-development in the periphery. This is why Walter Rodney titled his seminal work, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972): there is no industrial development in the core, without under development and exploitation in the peripheries. While changing in form and content, and facing enormous resistance from anti-colonial movements around the world, this system has effectively persisted from the 15^th century to the present. It is impossible to fully understand Ireland’s political, economic and cultural present, without understanding its function within the capitalist world system.

Fortunately, we do have a tradition of thought in Ireland that takes seriously Ireland’s trajectory of development during and after formal independence (in the South), including the changing function it plays as a semi-periphery within US-dominated capitalism after WWII. From the 1980s, scholars such as J.K. Jacobsen, Denis O’Hearn, Hilary Tovey, Eamon Slater, James Wickham, Prionnsias Breathnach, Ronnie Munck, Joe Cleary and David Lloyd pushed against the facile ‘end of history’ thesis that imagined all peoples and countries advancing towards the universal goal of liberal, capitalist modernity. In that, they were part of a broader intellectual and political culture that, on this island at least, was anti-imperialist, republican and in solidarity with national liberation and social movements across the then Third World.

At the same time, these cultures of thought and political orientation were attacked and marginalised through the revisionist turn in Irish public life. This turn sought to distance an emerging liberal, Euro-American present from a supposedly repressive, nationalist past and the ‘menacing violence’ of anti-colonial struggle in the six counties. Revisionism was the default position and cultural consensus by the turn of the 21^st century as questions about Ireland’s development and place in the world appeared to be answered by EU integration and the economic successes of the FDI model, as US tech and pharma companies made Ireland their home. During my college education from the early 2000s, I rarely encountered academic work that foregrounded Ireland’s colonial experience, partition, imperialism or the capitalist world system. The work of Conor McCabe, Sharae Deckard, Bill Rolston and Robbie McVeigh being the exception.

This has all changed in the past few years, most sharply since October 7^th, the US and EU backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, wars on Iran, Lebanon and Yemen, and the discarding of any pretence to international law, human rights or multilateralism by the Western powers. These world-historic events have prompted a dramatic reckoning in Ireland, not just with our complicity in US imperial wars but our economic role in, and dependency on, US capital. Ireland is Israel’s second largest export partner, with foreign direct investment and corporation tax relying on a small number of US tech and pharma firms. This economic dependency has manifested as geopolitical leverage, as the US effectively has a veto over Irish foreign policy. We may have had a sense of these relationships before 2023, but it was never so visible, nor so explicitly antithetical to the values many of us hold.

This dissonance has driven people back to an understanding of Ireland’s colonial arc and the unfinished revolution we are left to grapple with. Partition is part of this, as is the dependent model of development in the South. As we learn from the contributions in this themed issue, this model not only produces uneven development and infrastructural deficits, but also aligns us with the US and EU in the context of intensifying geopolitical competition and militarisation.

In May 2026, Juliana Sassi, Criostóir King and Jack Bergin organised a session at the Conference of Irish Geographers in UCC. They were marking fifty years since another group of young, Irish geographers convened a two-day conference in Dublin to discuss “Radical Approaches to Irish Geography: Historical and Contemporary.” The proceedings of this 1978 conference were published in a 1980 special issue of Antipode, which examined Ireland’s development through the lens of dependency theory. Drawing on insights from the Latin American school, contributors situated Ireland within this intellectual tradition, arguing that the country’s development trajectory had been shaped by colonialism and structural dependence on core capitalist nations.

This themed issue of Rundale revisits the 1980 Antipode Special Issue, under the title: Dependency, Imperialism and Ireland Today. The contributions all seek to understand Ireland’s positionality within the contemporary world economy and what this means for social movements and political organising. Juliana Sassi begins by showing how the post-2007 housing regime represents a renewed alignment among global finance capital, the Irish state, and the local comprador class. This new arrangement has intensified and extended Ireland’s economic subordination to core capitalist nations into the sphere of social reproduction, primarily through rent extraction and the consolidation of residential ownership.

Prionnsias Breathnach was one of the original contributors to the 1980 special issue of Antipode. Today, he writes that while the Irish economy is profoundly different from that created in the early decades of the FDI-model, in structural terms it remains a neo-colonial appendage of the US transnational sector with a primary function of facilitating tax avoidance on a massive scale.

While rural decline is an ever-present and recurring theme in Irish politics, it rarely gets beyond superficial understandings and analysis.  In his contribution, Criostóir King connects rural underdevelopment with Ireland’s dependent economic model, a perspective that opens up the possibility of more hopeful alternatives.

Conchúr Ó Maonaigh has already written for Rundale about technological dependency in the context of Electric Vehicles and decarbonisation. In this issue, he focuses on the Irish state’s dependence on management consultancy firms following the global financial crisis, arguing that these firms helped to hollow out public institutions while simultaneously directing environmental, social, and economic policies towards market-oriented objectives.

Finally, Patrick Brodie explains how data centre expansion in Ireland represents a model of ‘dependent development,’ facilitating and supporting US imperial interests and monopoly capital. Campaigns against tech monopolies and for a data centre moratorium show a growing popular rejection of this unjust and irrational model of development.

As well as the five dependency themed articles, this issue of Rundale has three standalone articles. Ellen Howley describes her visit to La Fête de l’Humanité, France’s largest left-wing cultural and political festival, and considers the political landscape in a country just six months away from Presidential elections.

Deanna Horton looks at the surprising legal and environmental history behind Ireland’s present day digital infrastructure. Long before the cloud, outdated planning regimes quietly misclassified early data-processing facilities as simple office work, opening the way for Ireland’s present day digital infrastructure.

And last but certainly not least, Stephen O’Neill reflects on the media’s reaction to the Garvaghy Road dispute and how this reinforces a hierarchy of ‘knowledge’ about the six counties. As a new ‘United Ireland’ initiative threatens to do the same, questioning how this ‘knowledge’ is produced and maintained is urgent.