Ireland's Limerick Plant Is Feeding Russia's War Machine — The Taoiseach Just Said: No Change.

Ireland's largest industrial facility has been sending more than two-thirds of what it produces to Russia — every year since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began. This morning, the Taoiseach was asked whether that changes. He said no.
The plant is Aughinish Alumina in County Limerick. It is owned by Rusal, a Russian conglomerate with documented Kremlin connections. A joint investigation by The Irish Times and the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project traced the supply chain from the Shannon estuary through Siberian smelters to a Moscow trading company — and from there to dozens of firms on the E.U. sanctions list. Firms manufacturing the equipment currently being used in Ukraine.
Every link in that chain is, technically, legal. Alumina is not sanctioned. That is the gap this video explains.
Ireland is not a passive bystander in this. Irish officials lobbied Washington in two thousand and eighteen to keep the plant outside sanctions on its owner, Oleg Deripaska. That lobbying worked. The plant kept running. The share of its output going to Russia went from twenty-three percent to sixty-eight percent in the years that followed.
Dozens of European Parliament members — from the same political groupings as Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil — have now written to the European Commission demanding alumina be included in the next sanctions package. The Belgian government wants the loophole closed. The head of the Ukrainian parliament's foreign affairs committee told the Oireachtas Committee directly: stop this.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR IRELAND: On the first of July, Ireland takes over the Presidency of the Council of the European Union — and will chair the meetings at which the next sanctions package may be debated. Ireland has said its Presidency will stand on values. It will now chair the room where that claim is tested.

Видео Ireland's Limerick Plant Is Feeding Russia's War Machine — The Taoiseach Just Said: No Change. канала Éire Pulse