Towering over 1,000 acres along the Shannon estuary in Aughinish in Co Limerick, the giant red and white chimney stacks of the Russian-owned Rusal alumina refinery dwarf nearby homes and farms.
Built six years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the controversial alumina extraction plant is now facing dangers from a new Cold War, one that now threatens its 500 workers, along with hundreds of other local jobs.
Local ship chandler Vincent Kelly will be one of those affected if the European Union puts Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska on its sanctions list. It would, he says simply, be "disastrous" .
Now 71, Kelly's family-run business has fed the Aughinish workforce every day and provided supplies to the ships that anchor at Rusal's port near Foynes for the past 40 years.
“We supply the ships with deck engine stores, chemicals, cleaning chemicals, food, drink. Everything a ship would need or want. There’s two ships every day, so it would mean that 70 per cent of our ship business would be gone,” Kelly says.
Deripaska, a close associate of Vladimir Putin, reduced his controlling stake in Aughinish in 2019 to 49 per cent after he faced US sanctions, while he is now on the UK sanctions lists, alongside Chelsea owner Roman Abramovich.
“If there’s any more sanctions against Aughinish it will affect the ordinary worker a lot more than the oligarch,” says Kelly, “It’s the workers and the community and the people who have local businesses that are going to suffer.”
Previous sanctions led to production cuts in Aughinish, he said. “For months we didn’t supply one ship. [It] was under construction when I came here, the Cold War was still going on. Now, we don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Grocery stores
Carmel Ryan, a local mother and vice-chair of the Askeaton Civic Trust, is fearful. " Lots of people working in small businesses will be indirectly affected if the plant closes...shops, grocery stores."
Opened in 1983, the alumina plant has defined Aughinish and surrounding districts for decades. Some 6,000 construction workers helped to build it, often staying as lodgers with local people.
“It put people on their feet, it allowed people to buy a site and build a house with a loan, put in a back kitchen, have a second bathroom, have a second car,” she says, “It also allowed people who had emigrated to come back.
“If there’s no more money you will no longer continue to have the local services we currently enjoy; if it is sanctioned it would devastate the place, and there’ll be a whole generation who will lose.”
Local Fianna Fáil councillor Kevin Sheahan says he must continue to support Aughinish workers despite the Ukraine bloodshed. "My heart goes out to the people of Ukraine, but my heart and soul are with the men and women working in Aughinish and their families."
Sanctions that affect workers are not justified, he said, adding that larger European powers should start at home when it comes to imposing sanctions on Russians: “We don’t have to be out in front of this posse at all.”
He fears if Aughinish closes it may never reopen. If that happens the site must be returned to how it looked in 1979. “Every taxpayer in this country would be landed with a bill of millions to restore it to its original state,” he said.
Workers in the plant would not be identified, but their concerns are evident.
"There's people working there from north Kerry, west Limerick and from around the Cork border. It's a great employer. There's people on big money, with big mortgages, cars, kids in childcare and in college, and the company pays the workers' health insurance – it's massive. We can only hope and pray," one worker told The Irish Times.
Expansion
However, not everyone locally is a fan. Cappagh Farmers Support Group have conducted a long-running campaign opposing the expansion of Rusal's operations over environmental risks to people and livestock.
Vast ponds of "red mud" that interrupt the estuary's green hinterland are to be expanded if Rusal is successful in a planning application that is currently before An Bord Pleanála for decision.
The hazardous residue is left after alumina is extracted from bauxite ore which arrives at Rusal's port on ships from Guinea and Brazil, and is then exported to be refined into aluminium at smelters across the globe.
Local farmer Pat Geoghegan has complained for years that his family's health has suffered and his livestock have died from toxic waste carried on the wind from Aughinish on to his land at Boolaglas.
The charges have long been denied by Rusal, and they have yet to be substantiated despite a number of investigations by the Environmental Protection Agency and the former Mid-Western Regional Health Board.
Rusal has also sought to expand the height level of another hazardous material, salt cake, but Geoghegan claims the expansion poses unacceptable risk to the estuary and human health.
“When the sanctions were put on there in 2018 we didn’t know ourselves. Emissions went down, and we thought we had a new farm. We were able to walk around and breathe properly,” he said.