133 Times the Limit - The Irish Politics Newsletter

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133 Times the Limit<br>Arsenic and aluminum in the waters around Aughinish

The Irish Politics Newsletter<br>Aug 03, 2026

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The water is pure. It tastes of nothing, it’s for the most part bland; it is the colour of nothing, harmless really, but there’s arsenic in the groundwater around Aughnish, which is being reported by Conor Gallagher in the Irish Times to be 133 times the legal limit. Arsenic does not announce itself. It does not stain the glass or leave a metallic aftertaste on the tongue. It is omnipresent but invisible. It simply arrives, dissolves, and remains invisible, waiting. The problem, you see, is not the poison itself but the labour of persuasion of convincing the entire Aughinish community and surrounding areas that the clear, boring, tasteless water they have always drawn from the ground is, in fact, a slow and patient poisonous assassin living inside them. But the farmers around Aughinish know this and have been telling us for almost three decades.<br>Once arsenic is ingested over and over, the body begins its convulsions. Skin rises in dark, leprous patches; the gut seizes and empties itself in violent spasms; blood appears in the vomit like a private confession. Later come the more ambitious and deleterious failures: the bladder, the lungs, the kidneys, the skin itself turning traitor, blossoming into cancers that feel almost too personal in their thoroughness. These are not subtle afflictions; they are loud, wet, and unmistakable in their suffering. Yet without the correct scientific name attached to them, they remain ordinary misfortunes, the usual degradations of poverty, of bad luck, of living too long in a place that has never loved you. The arsenic does not merely poison; it renders the entire catalogue of human misery indistinguishable from itself. The farmers know this. They have been telling us for almost three decades now, but who is listening?<br>When Micheál Martin still wore the title of Minister for Health, he met with Pat Geoghegan of the Cappagh Farmers Support Group on three separate occasions between 2001 and 2003. The meetings have the quality of a half-forgotten political ritual: the minister, the farmer activist, the quiet exchange of papers that somehow never quite became a plan of action, but people often forget Michéal Martin is a Bertie Ahern school of politics alumnus, verba non acta was a political adroitness they practised as a matter of faith. Micheál Martin and Fianna Fáil have known about the allegations against Aughinish Alumina for more than a quarter of a century now, long enough for the knowledge itself to have calcified into something like a tradition, a secret everyone pretends is still secret.<br>Niall Collins, the local Fianna Fáil TD and fatuus, has perfected the art of the dismissive yawn. Challenge him on the health effects of the refinery, or on the quiet shipment of war material towards Russia, and the yawn arrives on cue, a soft, parliamentary exhalation that is meant to signal how very boring the whole subject has become. On the current-affairs circuit, Collins has been a tireless lapa an chait for Aughinish Alumina. He even told RTÉ, with the serene confidence of a man preparing to invade Ukraine, that “there has been no law, regulation, condition of licence or EU sanction that has been broken by the Aughinish plant.” This is untrue. In 2001, the plant released five hundred thousand litres of highly alkaline effluent into the Shannon estuary, an event large enough to register on the scale of an industrial accident, yet somehow too small to register on the scale of political memory. The company only contacted the Environmental Protection Agency fifteen hours after the spill. Describing the substance as “extremely alkaline”, Dr Gerry Byrne, programme manager for the EPA, said in court that it “posed a threat to human health and would have killed all flora and fauna which came into contact with it, as it flowed into the estuary”. How did Collins not know this? How did he fail to research or notice that his own party leader had once been heavily involved in an investigation into the same facility while serving as Minister for Health? Collins will tell you it is all about employment. Jobs for the pollution. Jobs for the Russian war machine. There is a peculiar modern political degradation in Collins's appraisement: the willingness to prostitute a landscape, and the people who still live on it, for the continued favour of a fascist dictatorship and a sanctioned Russian oligarch that is slowly, methodically poisoning the very ground one is elected to represent. It is a new low, or perhaps simply the logical endpoint of Irish politics that has long preferred the abstract glow of “jobs” to the concrete fact of dying animals and sickened bodies. Aughinish Alumni received a conviction for criminal behaviour for the incident. And yet Collins, poor Collins, somehow remained innocent of this...