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Last week the European Parliament in Strasbourg voted on amendments which called for a full export ban of alumina to Russia. This was undoubtedly a measure responding to media attention on County Limerick’s Aughinish Alumina refinery. Owned by Rusal, and exporting the vast majority of its materials to the Russian Federation, the refinery was quick to draw criticism from across the Irish political spectrum.
Fine Gael and Sinn Féin voted in favour of the resolution. But strangely enough, Fianna Fáil MEPs abstained on the vote. Their justifications provided a rare moment of clarity from the party’s Brussels delegation. Billy Kelleher argued that a sanction ‘must hurt the enemy more than it hurts yourself,’ and that the EU relies on Aughinish’s output for its own industry. Meanwhile Barry Andrews complained that the amendment was indifferent to the security of Europe’s own critical mineral supply-chains.
What is most surprising is that these comments, taken in isolation from their MEPs’ political histories, are far more reminiscent of the old Fianna Fáil than Taoiseach Micheál Martin might like. Fianna Fáil used to be an unsentimental, transactional party which weighed Ireland’s national interests into its every policy decision, irrespective of whether those policies were explicitly motivated by public interest. So to see this instinct rear its head over the Aughinish Alumina debate of all things, is frankly bizarre. Ireland has spent the past four years supporting Ukraine in public, and exporting refined materials critical to modern manufacturing to Russia. The whiplash in Fianna Fáil must be staggering. So much so that the party now thinks that there is something to be won in the court of public opinion by sticking to their guns.
To fully understand how strange Fianna Fáil’s Strasbourg pivot was, the party’s history in Europe must be examined. Before the party’s communications team smoothed their European sensibilities into a parable of a visionary party, they were the party of rural and working-class Ireland. Seán Lemass applied for EEC membership in 1961 not because he aspired to a federalised European project, but because economic protectionism had failed, and Britain was moving towards Europe. Jack Lynch carried Ireland’s accession through in 1972 along the same lines — Europe was an economic means to achieve national ends such as market access, modernisation, and an escape from the Sterling Area. Upon joining, Ireland negotiated for critical regional development funds, and today it defends its corporate tax regime. Those actions could not be implemented, let alone planned, by today’s Fianna Fáil. Ireland was historically a supporter of European economic integration, but it was never uncritical.
In fact, Fianna Fáil’s Brussels seating arrangements reflected this. For decades Fianna Fáil sat with Gaullist parties in the European Parliament and from 1999 in the Union for Europe of the Nations — a sovereigntist bench it shared with Poland’s Law and Justice, Italy’s Alleanza Nazionale and the Danish People’s Party. These details are now treated as hidden embarrassing secrets from the party’s past. But Fianna Fáil’s alignment here was not out of place. An Irish republican, nationalist, rural party which at that time believed in the nation-state as the basic unit of European cooperation, naturally belonged there. What is most interesting is that in 2009, Fianna Fáil and Law and Justice, both members of the same political grouping, took opposing political paths.
In 2009 Fianna Fáil joined the liberals of ALDE, the grouping that would later fuse under Macronist leadership into Renew Europe. But by this stage Fianna Fáil had well proven it had lost its capacity to criticise the institutions of the European Union. When the Irish public rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001, a Fianna Fáil government ran the referendum a second time. When they rejected the Lisbon Treaty in 2008, a Fianna Fáil government repeated the referendum yet again. And when the state’s finances collapsed, it was a Fianna Fáil government that invited in the Troika and socialised the losses of the banking system at the insistence of the European Central Bank.
One wonders whether the shedding of the party’s sovereigntist skin was part of the price it paid after the economic crash. A party rebuilding itself during a supervised economic and political recovery could hardly afford to be seen on the eurosceptic benches. Whatever the proximal cause might be, the results are plain to see today where within Fianna Fáil doubt about Brussels has become a taboo.
But not ever Fianna Fáiler got the memo. In 2014 Brian Crowley — the party’s sole surviving MEP — walked out of ALDE and joined the ECR, describing it as a ‘non-federalist, pro-EU group who believes in giving a much stronger say to national governments rather than to EU institutions.’ Effectively the most popular Fianna Fáil politician in the country at that time, with over 180,000 first preference votes, Crowley had restated the party’s pre-2009 position — and was expelled from the party for doing so. This episode illustrated precisely where the ideological centre of gravity behind Fianna Fáil’s voterbase laid, and just how determined the party leadership was to sit somewhere else.
Yet that mismatch was never resolved. Renew Europe styles itself as an urban, secular, federalist and technocratic political vehicle. Membership of such a group would be anathema to Fianna Fáil under the leadership of Lynch and Lemass. The party is effectively the Macronist ‘Jupiterian’ spearhead into Europe, but has floundered under the weight of the French President’s hubris.
Fianna Fáil on the contrary, claims descent from small farmers, publicans, GAA clubs and the Irish republican tradition. Its members venerate Lemass and Lynch precisely because they negotiated with Europe to craft a deal with worked to Ireland’s favour. Now Fianna Fáil sits in a grouping whose instincts on tax harmonisation, defence integration and institutional centralisation run contrary to the very principles of the party.
There is something quite fitting in the comparison of Micheál Martin and Emmanuel Macron: two leaders fluent in the language of concern, masters of the anguished statement and the deferred decision. Asked about Aughinish Alumina, the Taoiseach promised to ‘develop an approach’ with the Commission and is renowned for speaking about every issue ‘in terms of’ what he might do.
Which brings us back to Fianna Fáil’s abstention last week in Strasbourg. It should not be read as a recovery of an old instinct. It is hedging — the party’s eternal instinct to be simultaneously the government and the opposition, pro-European in Brussels and sceptical in Foynes, solemn about Ukraine in Dublin Castle and cautious about sanctions when Limerick workers’ payroll is on the line. The party has discovered the vocabulary of the national interest just long enough to sit on its hands before the government’s investigation into Aughinish Alumina confirms what we all already know.
What is significant is that when the stakes were real and localised, Fianna Fáil MEPs reached instinctively for defensive arguments — supply chains, proportionality, national discretion, scepticism of parliamentary gesture politics — that their own group rejects and which Micheál Martin has disowned. The old party is still in there somewhere, muffled under two decades of liberal upholstery. If Fianna Fáil genuinely believes, as Billy Kelleher put it, that Europe should not do things that damage itself more than its adversaries, then they should ask themselves why they sit in a grouping for which that thought is heretical — and why the last man in the party to act on the question lost the whip for it.
The only defining trait of Fianna Fáil across its century-long history is that it is subservient to its leader. That subservience has in the past been wielded to produce wonders under Eamon de Valera and Charlie Haughey. But it can also be used for petty personal interests which submit the Irish public to cruel and unusual circumstances for the sake of one man’s delusions.