Aughinish Alumina Bauxite refinery is a ticking time bomb on the river Shannon, its toxic red mud pile an environmental disaster which will poison the whole estuary if it is left to continue expanding. Despite the urgency of the environmental disaster, many bad actors have chosen to minimise this and use the issue of Aughinish to push a Russophobic Pro-NATO line to further align Ireland with Western imperialism.
Aughinish Alumina is owned by Rusal, the company of western aligned Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska. The Alumina, or Aluminium Oxide, from Aughinish gets shipped to mainland Europe and to Rusals finishing plants in Russia to be manufactured into finished Aluminium, which supplies both European and Russian industries. Aluminium is not a critical component for weapons manufacturing. It is a relatively cheap metal which can be sourced from many places around the world. If this Alumina ends up in weaponry it is most likely in both NATO and Russian weaponry, as Aughinish owner Rusal is by far Europe’s biggest supplier. Any cursory value of Aughinish Alumina to the Russian military is cancelled out by its value to European supply lines and dwarfed by magnitudes of thousands or even millions, by the value of Intel in Naas, Microsoft, Amazon and Google in Dublin to the Zionist dominated US war machine.
Canadian mining and minerals giant Alcan started construction of Aughinish Alumina in 1978, with operations beginning in 1983. Throughout the years there were many incidences of cancer and sickness in People and livestock in the region. There was a large scale cover up into these deaths and illnesses by the free state EPA in the 1990s. This was all while Aughinish was still owned by Canadian Multinational Alcan.
In 2007 Alcan was acquired by British-Australian Mining multinational Rio Tinto and Aughinish was sold to Rusal, Owned by Russian Oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Deripaska stole the wealth of their country during the periods of mass privatisation in the 1980s and 1990s. He off-shored this stolen wealth in Cyprus, where he lives and where holds dual nationality. Deripaska, is part of a global elite aligned with western imperialism. He is implicated in the Epstein files numerous times. He stole the wealth of Russia and now uses Ireland as a pollution haven. Russians would be glad to see the back of him but they have to deal with him for now because he is so powerful.
Despite Deripaska’s clear western alignment, this hasn’t stopped Irish state controlled media and paid NATO influencers from pushing the false narrative that Aughinish Alumina is an instrument of Russian military power in Ireland. These propagandists ignore or minimise the environmental urgency of Aughinish and State complity in cover ups, in order to undermine Irish neutrality and push Ireland into Zionist aligned EU military alliance. One such influencer who has been algorithmically promoted in recent weeks is Caolan Robertson. Caolan has quite the resume, having previously worked with Tommy Robinson and Alex Jones who he now apparently disavows. Speaking of these formative years he described his task: “Focus on conflict. Feed the algorithm. Reinforce the narrative. Don’t worry if it’s true”. Apparently, Caolan has now abandoned these dubious methods that you might mistakenly think he got from some Mi6 handbook and now lives in Kyiv to document the plight of the Ukrainians to receptive European audiences.
Why the sudden push against Aughinish from state media and NATO talking heads? Aughinish Alumina in West Limerick is the single largest individual site user of natural gas in Ireland. Its refining and combined heat and power (CHP) operations require about 19 GWh of gas per day, which accounts for approximately 11% of Ireland’s total daily gas demand. With the free state government still finding ways to get Shannon LNG past planning, data center developers are scrambling to get the next megawatt connection, and 11% of gas freed up gives them plenty of room to expand operations and feed the AI bubble dominated by Silicon valley and increasingly more so by Tel Aviv.
Environmentalists and affected locals have been saying for years that, the toxic Bauxite residue pile which can be seen from space desperately needs to be cleaned up, the plant decommissioned and the 500 employees need to be found viable dignified employment. This cannot come at the advantage of Zionist dominated US monopoly tech multinationals. Only when we break the chains of Zionist control, can we have indigenous industry and a project of sovereign national development here in Ireland.
Now is the time to demand justice for the river Shannon and its residents, who have suffered the violence of a vassal state, a state which chose to cover up the violence of the capitalist class and sacrifice its working people and its greatest river.