Up in the driver’s seat of a lime green CLAAS tractor, a young man called Dylan told me he was the second tractor to arrive on O’Connell Street, Dublin’s main street, for fuel protests that would bring Ireland to a standstill for nearly a week. The tractor in front of him, belonging to his boss, had a sign warning “No Farms, No Food”. The 19-year-old agricultural contract worker sat with two friends, young women of 16 and 17, out to support him. He had slept nights in the tractor in the biting April cold, along with many other farmers, fishers and truckers whose vehicles lined both sides of the street.

“It’s profit before people,” Dylan said of campaigners’ complaints about the government’s levying of 60% in duties and taxes on fuel continuing during a crisis. “It’s affecting everyone – it’s affecting our businesses, it’s affecting yourselves if you’re running a car or heating your house. Eventually if we don’t get what we want, it’s going to start affecting the price of food on the shelves and no one is going to be able to afford anything.”

The illegal war on Iran, as the Irish president rightly decried it, shows no sign of ending soon. The resulting oil price shock is now laying bare Ireland’s acute dependency on fossil fuels, on road transport and on a volatile global supply system – as well as successive governments’ failure to plan ahead for a just transition to clean energy.

For six days the fuel protesters blocked motorways and ports and blockaded Ireland’s only oil refinery in County Cork, as well as fuel depots in Limerick and Galway. By Friday, petrol stations were starting to run dry. While government ministers vilified the protests as “wrong” and a threat to national security and critical supplies – the justice minister threatened to send the........

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