Instability in the Middle East did much to destabilise the politics and economics of 1970s Ireland, as the resultant oil crises upended plans and diluted optimism. Irish entry to the European Economic Community (EEC), backed by 83 per cent of the electorate, was soured in 1973 by the oil embargo imposed on western powers due to the Yom Kippur War. Historian Ciarán Casey observes in his 2022 history of the Department of Finance that plans for economic and social development were compromised by “unanticipated shocks”. Minister for Finance in 1973, Richie Ryan, reacted by seeking to stimulate the economy but then went into reverse mode due to the spike in inflation. Oil prices quadrupled from 1973-76 and inflation rose to what were described as “frightening” rates of 17 per cent in 1974 and 21 per cent in 1975.

Such was the scale of the international surprise in 1973 – “the shock of the global” to use a phrase adopted by historians – that it suggested globalisation could be as threatening as it was empowering, and governments internationally were under domestic pressure to take the poison out of its sting, some believing they could spend their way out of trouble.

Oil had soured things again by the end of that decade due to the Iranian revolution in 1979. In May that year, the minister for industry and commerce, Des O’Malley, announced that tourists arriving to Ireland by car ferry would be given vouchers to obtain a minimum supply of petrol. This decision was unveiled on a day, recorded The Irish Times, that saw “several motorists camping outside petrol stations overnight”. O’Malley sternly warned those engaging in “tank-topping, hoarding or irregular storage of petrol in present circumstances” that they were acting in the “most selfish and antisocial manner”.

It was also a decade when there was focus on oil exploration in Ireland; historian Joe Lee suggests “always at the back of the mind lurked the idea that wet gold would be struck”. Instead of lucky strikes, there was increased borrowing, frowned on by the ESRI, and a straitened EEC, lacking the scale of regional development funds Ireland desired. More broadly, historian Eric Hobsbawm in his Age of Extremes (1994), concluded the industrialised world “lost its bearings”. The puncturing of assumptions about uninterrupted growth gave rise to inflation, unemployment, social unrest, unease about control of energy, recalibration of international relations and debate about nuclear power. The oil crises also discouraged restrictions on production and fostered hostility to regulation.

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Contexts change significantly, but some essential dilemmas do not. With the current crisis, Ireland, with a substantial budget surplus, is of course at an advantage, and the focus is on cost rather than capping, but the pressures of spending to shield customers, in face of warnings about mistargeted support or alleviation, create their own conundrums. Oil crises also divert attention; Casey notes that “a consistently striking feature” of the history of the Department of Finance is “the amount of time and energy consumed in responding to external events . . . by contrast, officials were afforded little time to proactively grapple with major long-term issues”. Charles Murray, secretary of the Department of Finance and then governor of the Central Bank in the 1970s, later lamented the paucity of “clear vision over long distances”.

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The current crisis also highlights the sad longevity of the toxic combination of hubris, power and corruption the control of oil has generated, elaborated on in French journalist Matthieu Auzanneau’s Oil, Power and War: A Dark History (2015). Reaching back to the first commercial oil wells of the 1850s, he documents the deployment of “tools of policy and power – tools that were both financial and military, and often covert and terrifying”, while reminding us that “the perils of our dependency on fossil fuels have been understood since the beginning of the industrial revolution, though they’ve been consistently ignored”. Auzanneau further observed: “Whether we like it or not . . . the laws of nature appear to be on the brink of imposing a radical change in the course of the brief history of human technology.”

But the warnings are not being taken seriously enough. In the 1970s, Ireland was dependent on oil for 75 per cent of its energy needs. Late last year, in a statistical release, the Central Statistics Office highlighted that in 2023, renewable energy made up just 5.8 per cent of Ireland’s total final energy consumption, the third-lowest percentage among the EU members: “When it comes to oil, over half of Ireland’s energy use (51.2 per cent) relied on this fuel, ranking Ireland as the fifth-highest user of oil in the EU27. This was significantly above the EU average of 37.4 per cent. Ireland therefore stood out for its heavy reliance on oil (all of which is imported) and low adoption of renewable energy compared to other EU countries.”

We are still far too exposed to the “shock of the global”.

© The Irish Times