War is something that we like to think affects other people in other places. That fiction is getting harder to maintain.

Four weeks ago, home heating oil cost around €500 for a fill. Then it was €700, before climbing to €880. This week, my mother was quoted over €1,000. It is March, and she still needs heating – but to know whether to buy now or wait, she would need to assess the likelihood of a ceasefire in the Middle East, the status of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz and the trajectory of Brent crude futures. These are not decisions a woman in Ireland should have to make to heat her home; they are decisions that a functioning national strategy should absorb on her behalf.

In four weeks, a war in the Middle East has rewritten the economics of daily life on this island. The Government has responded with a €250 million package – excise cuts, a diesel rebate for hauliers, a four-week extension of the fuel allowance – and these are reasonable measures, as far as they go. But they are entirely reactive, designed to soften the blow of what could be a long-term crisis rather than to manage one.

What Ireland does not yet have is a strategy.

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Other countries do. Victoria, Australia, has made all public transport free for April. South Korea has launched a 12-point conservation campaign including vehicle restrictions, staggered commuting hours and restarting nuclear reactors. Sri Lanka has moved to a four-day working week. The International Energy Agency has called for remote work, lower speed limits and a shift to public transport – estimating that three additional days working from home could cut national oil consumption from cars by up to six per cent.

Ireland has done none of this, yet even the limited measures we have taken have become a political argument about generosity versus prudence – the Opposition says the package is too little, the Government says it is being responsible – and the actual question disappears into the noise. But that question is not how much money to spend cushioning the price shock, it is whether Ireland can organise itself to use less fuel while this lasts, and to build structures that make the next shock hurt less.

A strategy would work on three timescales at once by reducing energy demand immediately; enabling sector-level co-ordination over the medium term and creating structural transition over the long term. Importantly, it would be honest about what Ireland can and cannot do right now.

Take our public transport, for example. The obvious move is to make public transport free on commuter routes, at least for a month. But even this straightforward measure exposes a deeper problem I have discussed here before: that Ireland’s public transport network is already overstretched where it exists, and largely absent in the parts of the country where people are most dependent on their cars. Victoria can make public transport free because it built a public transport system. But Ireland needs to manage a fuel crisis with infrastructure it never invested in, and the absence of slack in the system is not an accident. Sadly, it is the consequence of decades of policy choices that treated transport and energy as someone else’s problem. Free fares should still happen where routes exist, but we should be honest that it is a gesture of relief, not a strategy.

Remote work is more immediately actionable. Issue a national advisory – not a vague encouragement, but a specific protocol stating that if your job can be done from home, your employer should facilitate three days a week from home for the duration of the crisis. The logic that applied during yellow weather warnings applies now, except that this particular storm is not passing in 48 hours.

[ Oil price rise to have deeper inflation impact than just increases at the pumpsOpens in new window ]

Then co-ordinate with the sectors that cannot work from home. Tillage farmers are burning €3,000 to €4,000 of diesel a week during the weeks when the work simply cannot stop, as barley does not care for geopolitics. These sectors need targeted fuel allocations, not a general excise cut that treats everyone the same.

Schools should be part of the conversation too, as staggered hours would reduce peak-time transport demand – which sounds radical until you remember South Korea is already doing it.

And then use this crisis to accelerate the structural transition that Ireland keeps deferring.

In 2022, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine sent energy prices soaring and the Government responded with billions in electricity credits that did nothing to change the underlying condition. Four years later, Ireland’s dependence on imported fossil fuels remains exactly where it was.

There is a deeper question here, one that Ireland has not yet confronted. Over the past three decades, this country became the European home of Apple, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and most of the American technology industry – and, increasingly, of their data centres, which now consume roughly a fifth of Ireland’s electricity. These are, in effect, strategic infrastructure – the European backbone of American technology – and they run on energy that Ireland does not produce and cannot guarantee. We negotiated the tax arrangements without ever negotiating the energy security that hosting them requires.

That model delivered extraordinary prosperity, and there is no serious argument for unwinding it. But it also created a form of strategic alignment that Ireland never admitted to and never built policy architecture around. We did not join Nato. We did not develop an energy security strategy. And we certainly did not invest in the defence capability or the diplomatic infrastructure that normally accompanies proximity to a superpower. Instead, we absorbed the benefits of that proximity without acquiring any of the institutional resilience it demands. Energy is no longer just a household cost – it is the currency on which our entire economic model runs, and we do not control the supply.

[ We’re not experiencing a 1970s-style oil price shock just yet, but things are getting worseOpens in new window ]

Now the United States is at war in the Middle East, and the consequences are arriving at Irish petrol pumps. Ireland has no seat at the table where these decisions are made, no influence over the conflict driving the price spike, and no energy independence to insulate itself from the fallout. The prosperity was real, but the dependency is also real, and the absence of strategy – energy strategy, security strategy, industrial strategy – is what turns a dependency into a vulnerability.

Energy security is not only about fighter jets and naval patrols, it is about whether my mother can afford to heat her home when a strait 7,000km away is closed by a war she did not choose and a foreign policy she did not shape.

Sinéad O’Sullivan is a business economist, formerly at Harvard Business School.

© The Irish Times