The glorious Irish revolt against globalist insanity
The fuel protests in Ireland are a monumental event, a huge workers’ blow against Euro-technocracy.
There’s nothing like a drivers’ revolt to tease out the classism of the new elites. Then Canadian PM Justin Trudeau invoked the wartime Emergencies Act against truckers who had the temerity to agitate against Covid-19 vaccine mandates. European farmers who rose up against an eco-hike in fuel taxes were furiously denounced as ‘far right’ by the gated ponces who rule over them. And now in Ireland, the cossetted moralists of Dublin 4 have been roused into a frenzy of anti-worker bigotry by that most awful of sights: farmers, truckers, cabbies and others protesting over soaring fuel prices.
The events in Ireland are extraordinary. All last week, the country found itself in the grip of a furious revolt over fuel, the cost of living and other bread-and-butter matters on which the government has spectacularly failed. The price of fuel has rocketed in Ireland. Petrol and diesel prices have reached 193.9 cents and 218.9 cents respectively at filling stations. People can’t afford to fill up. Those whose lives depend on access to fuel – tractor drivers, deliverymen, cabbies – have been hit the hardest. ‘There are grown men crying because they are two weeks from losing their business’, said a protesting trucker in Limerick.
The people’s anger exploded last week and they hit the streets. Or roads, rather. Truckers and their allies enforced blockades at key fuel and freight sites in Galway, Cork, Limerick and Wexford. They refused to let fuel be transported around the country until something had been done about the cost of it. At Galway Port, a vast tanker called Thun Gemini – carrying six million litres of fuel – was prevented from docking by lines of farmers and truckers on the harbour.
In Dublin, a vast convoy of trucks and tractors occupied O’Connell Street, the street where the Irish Republic was born in the Easter Rising at the General Post Office in 1916. One of the most extraordinary sights of recent years in Ireland was seeing thousands of working-class Dubliners – not farmers, not truckers – flooding into O’Connell Street to offer solidarity to their struggling compatriots. Bikers, meanwhile, revving their engines, blocked O’Connell Bridge.
There have been many stirring acts of solidarity. People have delivered food to the truckers, many of whom slept in the cab of their trucks during the week-long blockades. In Athlone, a priest said Mass from the back of a truck to a gathering of protesters in the middle of the road. In Northern Ireland, a convoy of vans, tractors and even a limousine carried out a ‘go-slow’ protest in Strabane before crossing the border into Lifford in Co. Donegal to ‘stand in solidarity’ with their fellow workers in the republic. There’s ‘real anger across the whole island of Ireland’, said a solidarity trucker in the north. Our governments love to big up ‘cross-border cooperation’ in Ireland but something tells me they didn’t mean this.
The protesters are raging about the fact that ‘workers… are getting hammered left, right and centre every time they go out the front door’. At the supermarket, at the fuel pump, we’re being rinsed, said one trucker, and ‘something has to give’. And unlike their educated ‘betters’ in Dublin and London, they know this savage assault on their living standards is not wholly down to the Iran War. Yes, that conflict is exacerbating the cost-of-living crisis, especially with regards to fuel. But it was our own governments’ mismanagement of energy production and the economy that paved the way for 21st-century’s great ‘hammering’ of the working class.
As one protesting trucker points out, the price of diesel has ‘practically trebled’ in Ireland in recent years, long before the words ‘Strait of Hormuz’ were on the tip of everyone’s tongue. The Irish government’s carbon tax on fuel is especially hated. It is widely seen as a ‘virtue tax’, where the aloof technocrats of Dublin make a showy display of their commitment to ‘saving the planet’ with not a second thought to the impact their moral preening will have on the pockets of farmers, truckers and families. As the keffiyeh-adorned Trinity set blames everything on Trump, the Irish working classes aim their ire at their own ‘corrupt government’ and its elevation of globalist delusions like the eco-apocalypse over the material needs of the Irish people.
The levels of self-organisation in Ireland have been staggering. The nationwide revolt has taken place almost entirely outside the bounds of old workers’ bodies like trade unions and left-wing parties. The truckers organised themselves through online forums and WhatsApp groups. New bodies emerged in recent months, with names like the Irish Haulage Farming Construction Contractors Amalgamation. They held meetings in town halls and hotels where the depth of people’s anger was described as ‘astonishing and frightening’. They wrote to government officials pleading with them to suspend the carbon tax and cap fuel prices. But they were ignored. So through their digital networks, they called for action. ‘We have the country by the balls’, as a farmer said to a rowdy crowd on O’Connell Bridge in Dublin on Thursday.
This protest – like the gilet jaunes uprising in France and the farmers’ revolts across Europe – confirms the death of the organised left. As the 21st-century left, forged more from bourgeois campus lunacy than the fires of working-class revolt, obsesses over such thin ‘virtuous’ fare as trans rights and maniacal hatred for Israel, it is left to working people to organise themselves in the face of their remote, forbidding rulers. There is a gaping moral chasm between the keffiyeh left and the angry working class. Indeed, the former blocks oil infrastructure to express its haughty, weary exhaustion with modernity itself, while the latter blocks fuel sites because they want fuel to flow but cheaply. As the left swaps class politics for race and gender, and sacrifices its old goal of abundance at the altar of eco-hysteria, workers are compelled to go it alone.
The reaction of the Dublin establishment has been ferocious. Riot police were sent to break up the blockades in Galway and Cork. The army was put on standby – an implicit threat of a low-level civil war if the workers refused to surrender and go home. Their contempt for the protesters has been visceral. The minister for justice, Jim O’Callaghan, said the protesters are being ‘manipulated’ by ‘outside actors’ like Tommy Robinson. There is something profoundly imperious in this vision of Ireland’s working people as the putty-like playthings of nefarious foreigners. It rehabilitates the old colonial view of the Irish as a witless, child-like people.
And yet for all its bluster, the government has been forced to make concessions. It has announced a €505million package to support those ‘most impacted’ by fuel-price rises. It has also promised to postpone an increase in the carbon tax and to unveil a fuel-subsidy scheme for farmers. Whether this will be enough for protesters remains to be seen. But it is proof protest works. Real protest, that is, not those keffiyeh-shrouded orgies of performative virtue that have madly counted as ‘protest’ these past two-and-a-half years. Europe’s leaders are worried the fuel protests will spread. Fuel fury is already bubbling up in France and Norway. It seems the Iran War might just force a reckoning with the incompetence, idiocy and fake virtue of the apparatchiks who stink up Europe’s corridors of power.
What has happened in Ireland is monumental. Don’t let the lack of mainstream-media coverage blind you to how historic it is that the Irish republic was brought to a halt by working people. This is about more than fuel. This revolt has shone a bright light on the gaping divide – the economic, political and moral divide – between the modern ruling class and working people. Whether it is carbon taxes, threats to cull cattle to meet eco-targets or out-of-control immigration, the Irish are sick of their nation being treated as a laboratory for globalist policies of social re-engineering. They want sovereignty restored, climate madness clipped, and the government to be sane again. Watch others in Europe hit the streets to demand the same.
Written by Brendan O’Neill, spiked’s chief political writer
From spiked-online/April 13, 2026
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