View of Aughinish Alumina, Europe’s largest bauxite refinery, from the summit of nearby Christian pilgrimage site, Knockpatrick. This photograph, taken from the location where Saint Patrick is said to have ascended and blessed the landscape below in the fifth century, presents a typical view of the industrial complex with the Shannon and Fergus river estuaries in the distance. Once a vibrant area of seaweed harvesting and fishing dating back to at least medieval times, such activities are today almost non-existent in the shadow of the aging refinery, operational since 1983.
The cover of Time magazine by Ukrainian-American illustrator Boris Artzybasheff, published in July 1963. Known for a surreal approach incorporating the grotesque, modern machinery and the human psyche, Artzybasheff completed hundreds of magazine covers and corporate advertising campaigns during the ‘Mad Men’ era of post-war American expansionism. Time, then a weekly publication with a circulation of eight million in 1963, presented a distinct opportunity to promote Ireland’s then-fledgling industrialisation and foreign investment policies to prospective clients. Taoiseach Sean Lemass features, with a feisty leprechaun behind his shoulder, opening up shamrock-embroidered curtains to reveal a gigantic factory behind.
Hitting the newsstands two weeks after President John F. Kennedy’s famed high-profile visit to his ancestral Iand, an extensive editorial inside waxes lyrical and ‘lifts the green curtain’. It details a bold programme of industrialisation to break the cycle from its main export of beef, and people, to Britain, ‘as new opportunity lowers the perilously high emigration rate, the government is finally beginning to refute the bitter quip that Ireland “is a home for men rather than a breeding ground for emigrants and bullocks.”’
A map inside details intentions for a cluster of factories around the Shannon Estuary, today the location of Aughinish Alumina. Lemass is described as ‘a reticent, pragmatic planner called “the Quiet Man’’’ who has ‘sent blarney-blessed salesmen around the world persuading foreign industries to set up plans in Ireland. They offered one of the few labour surpluses in all Europe and liberal grants for equipment and construction.’
An origin story, seen in close detail, of two large cast aluminium doors at the Hunt Library of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Modern methods of aluminium production were first mastered in the city by Charles Martin Hall in 1886 at his modest chemistry laboratory inside a shed at the rear of his family home. His invention is seen as seminal, creating an inexpensive way of producing the first metal to achieve widespread use since the prehistoric discovery of iron. He helped create the Aluminium Company of America, better known as Alcoa. Later, following accusations of cartel activities in the North American production of this new technology, it became a parent company to Alcan, or Aluminium Company of Canada, in 1902. Decades after, Alcan were the primary investor and builders of Aughinish Alumina.
Created by an unknown artist and promoting heavy industry as a positive entity for all humanity, the panels here depict the ideals of prosperity and engineering, while other features on the door see wisdom, education, thrift, architecture, auditing and independence as aspirational themes.
An aerial view of Aughinish Island and the Shannon Estuary in 1978, prior to construction of the refinery. In later years, poet Michael D. Ryan’s Toomdeely Questions lamented the violent transformation soon to occur throughout the townlands surrounding this pastoral scene:
Ah, but then the air was fresh and clean
Sweet was the grass
In Ballysteen
Unsullied sweet Toomdeely
What pestilential scourge is here
What nameless shapeless spectral foe
Has threaded tentacles of fear
Into our hearts. We need to know
What sours the grass in Ballysteen
What sullies sweet Toomdeely
Cover of a promotional brochure from the late 1970s, designed and printed by Alcan Headquarters in Montreal and distributed throughout Limerick, Kerry and Clare to impress the public in advance of operations beginning at Aughinish. The gentle, undulating foreshore of the Shannon Estuary is here disciplined into geometric form as the building of the refinery takes shape, becoming Europe’s largest building site with over six thousand workers employed. Red rock bauxite will be mined in Jamaica and Africa; shipped to Aughinish; crushed and dissolved into caustic soda solution; placed in high pressure containers; filtered; drained; mixed with hydroxide crystals; heated at eleven hundred degrees Celsius to dry it into white powder alumina, then exported to smelters throughout the world to be transformed into aluminium. Leftover toxic waste from the process will be forever stored beside the refinery, although the brochure mentions this will be hidden in the landscape, hardly visible except to airplanes flying overhead. Airborne chemical omissions from the plant are briefly mentioned as a ‘not unpleasant odour which might be noticeable within a few hundred yards’.
Alcan CEO and chairman David Culver is pictured second from right on a visit to Aughinish in November 1978. An employee of the company since 1949, Culver was part of a corporate culture that, over decades, created a global infrastructure of mining, production, use and consumption of aluminium – businessmen who considered the role to sell aluminium as a new world order. Some, including Culver, compared their zeal in this task to the Jesuits’ spreading of Christian values throughout the world through charitable, educational and cultural pursuit.
Such allusions were apparent during his first visit to Ireland in June 1978, with Irish clergy keen to entertain Culver, starting with a dinner that raged to 4am with local ‘big wigs’. As recalled in his 2014 autobiography Expect Miracles: Recollections of a Lucky Life, ‘everyone was singing and weeping’. He was later awoken from jetlagged slumber in his cavernous hotel room at Dromoland Castle at 7am, ‘My phone rang. I picked it up and this lilting Irish voice said, “I'm the local priest here and I understand that you like to play golf. If you get out of bed and are downstairs in twenty minutes, I'll take you to Ballybunion, and we can have a round of golf and still be back in time for the sod turning.”’
After a round of golf ‘in the wind and the rain on that challenging but breathtaking course’, Culver made it back for the ceremony at Aughinish where then-Taoiseach Jack Lynch operated a thirty-ton bulldozer in front of four hundred guests including government ministers and foreign ambassadors to Ireland. Culver recalled a local bishop, ‘He sported a big red sash, a red skullcap, and an equally red face. When there was a pause in the ceremony, I turned to him and said, “I must say I'm pretty impressed with the golfing ability of your priests around here.” The bishop took a quick look around to see whether anybody was listening, leaned over, and whispered to me, “It's all they bloody well do!”’
Front cover of The West Limerick Study – A Baseline Study of Transition and Change. Paid for by Aughinish Alumina as a sociological study of the area in 1983, the book was researched and written by Joyce O'Connor and Mary Daly of the National Institute for Higher Education, today’s University of Limerick. With its corporate sponsor in mind, a green colour scheme shows silhouettes of chimney stacks rising up above a church steeple, suggesting the industry will become a new secular society, to reach higher than the conventions and stigma of Catholic Ireland.
Full of statistics, reports and the results of questionnaires, The West Limerick Study’s identification of the social and cultural effects of industrialisation, and the exploration of life and work changes in a rural area are key themes. The publication describes what it sees as a positive reception of heavy industry in the area and espouses transition from a tight-knit agrarian society as a necessary modern phenomenon. Yet, sixty percent of those surveyed noted they would prefer a small local industry settling up in the region rather than a ‘big foreign one’.
An advertisement issued by Aughinish Alumina’s public relations department appeared in local Limerick newspapers in September 1989. Three young children reading a book are juxtaposed beside an infomercial-style text, brashly celebrating the financial, social and environmental success of the Aughinish plant, then six years into production. Aughinish, nine letters long, is an anglicisation of the Irish name for the island, Each Inis, meaning island of horses. At their age they can’t spell Aughinish, but it could help spell their future! Is it preposterous to presume that children would not be able to spell the name of where they are from, without industrial assistance?
A series of images culled from The Aughinish Achievement, one of a series of short documentary videos produced by the public relations department of the refinery and screened at the Cork International Film Festival in 1986. In one scene at a chemistry lab, an employee handles samples of bauxite ore and alumina powder in front of the camera, as if the transformation of one into another was a form of alchemy or magic.
Much was made in the documentary about the building of the refinery, community relations and the annual open fun day. The Aughinish landscape before its industrialisation is cast as unimportant marsh and scrubland rather than a rich area of biodiversity, an empty terrain to be shaped by the power of visionary men. No mention was made of important historical discoveries from the Early Iron Age found during archaeological digs to make way for building – a significant find was a primitive iron horsebit, which, after dating by the National Museum of Ireland was adjudged (curiously considering the refinery’s function) to be the earliest example of iron work in all of Ireland.
A page from the out-of-print Achieving Excellence, a pamphlet issued on several occasions by Aughinish Alumina in its early decades of production. Presenting a positive and dynamic narrative of the company’s history, milestones, quality product and concern for the environment, an accompanying diagram explains the chemical processes involved in the refining of bauxite rock into white powder alumina, taking place on site on a continuous cycle 365 days a year.
The diagram functions as a concise chain of handling, yet with an incongruent representation of the generation of toxic waste. It is seen as a shape akin to a small waterfall with no graphic illustrating its resting place in the rural landscape. An accompanying text describing its final destination as a ‘pond’ rather than the reality of a 450-acre industrial site intended to contain it in perpetuity.
Themes of bauxite mining and aluminium production are often depicted on stamps and currency of developing nations entangled with the industry. Mineral-rich African nation Sierra Leone is the tenth largest producer of bauxite, a fact commemorated in a series of stamps issued in 1990. Bizarrely, Mickey Mouse appears digging up bauxite ore. More stamps see him admiring mining equipment and picking up an honorary degree at a local university. Uncle Scrooge also features, excitedly panning for gold in a river bed. From 1991 a bloody civil war, spurred on by the country’s abundant mineral wealth ensued for over a decade, with military forces seizing bauxite mines in the south west of the country.
‘The Polluter’s Paradox’ is the term given to the fact that the more polluting a company or sector is, the more it needs to spend on both politics and advertising to ensure it evades being properly regulated. Mining companies are widely known to have invested heavily in buying up politicians as well as bamboozling the public and regulators with misinformation designed to protect their ‘right’ to keep on polluting profitably.
During 1997 correspondence with the Irish Environmental Protection Agency on the issuing of a new operating licence, Aughinish representatives came out fighting, bringing the Magna Carta to bear. This famous legal document, from the year 1215, enshrined in law that no-one, including the King of England was above the law, while also making sure that whoever made the laws had particular limits in what they could enact. The company seized on this, reminding the EPA that their role, as an authority appointed by the Irish state, had limitations. They could not, according to Aughinish, impose any financial obligations on the firm towards the costs and risks of environmental pollution identified in any risk assessment of the site. Such action would be seen by the wider aluminium industry as ‘unfair and unexpected’. A subsequent request from the EPA that the company complete one daily measurement of the refinery's emissions was met with derision. This was an unnecessary expense, they claimed, writing that ‘it will require hiring an additional environmental technologist, and still this leaves no scope for sickness while the second technologist is on vacation, etc.’
Geographical relationships drift from life in Aughinish to many other places. Widely regarded as one of the most influential British photographers of his generation, Chris Killip’s Seacoal series was made on the coast of Lynemouth in the North East of England from 1976 to 1984. Leftover coal from the region’s defunct mining industries still washes ashore there, and for several decades became part of the production of the energy-hungry local aluminium industry.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
Killip writes, ‘When I first saw the beach at Lynemouth in January 1976, I recognised the industry above it but nothing else. The beach beneath me was full of activity with horses and carts backed into the sea. Men were standing in the sea next to the carts, using small wire nets attached to poles to fish out coal from the water beneath them. The place confounded time; here the Middle Ages and the twentieth century intertwined.’ He moved into a caravan there in 1983, joining a makeshift camp of former coal miners and several Gypsy families all working on the shore, and for fifteen months intensively photographed everyday life.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
Harvested coal was fed directly into the electrical power station and the power generated sent to Alcan’s aluminium smelter nearby. For decades, alumina powder made in Aughinish was transported by sea and rail to Lynemouth to be processed into aluminium. Due to the great amounts of power required for both the refining and smelting processes, facilities for both are never placed beside each other, instead spread throughout the globe. The smelter in Lynemouth ceased operations in 2012, with Alcan citing rising energy costs created by new European Union environmental legislation.
© Chris Killip Photography Trust/Magnum Photos
A photograph featured in Benedict Kiely’s book Ireland From the Air. While green fields, spectacular coastlines and medieval ruins all pepper the pages of the popular 1985 publication, another key emphasis of Kiely’s helicopter images is the industrialisation of Ireland; hydroelectric infrastructure, shipyards and power plants all feature. His image of Aughinish Alumina, then in its early days of production, is astonishing – bauxite waste ‘red mud’ appears beside groundwater seeping in and out of the Shannon Estuary. Kiely writes of his encounter that ‘there are modern “wonders” like this aluminium plant on Aughinish Island, which is spreading its red stain on the landscape, though not, one hopes, in the surrounding waters.’
A series of aerial images, culled from satellite imagery, detail various formations of the ‘red mud’ in 2009, 2014 and 2024.
This is a landscape continually being shaped, a complex now almost 30 metres high and over 550 acres in size, where millions of tonnes of toxic bauxite residue are held, a by-product of the chemical manufacturing process in the refinery. One of many such sites dotted throughout the globe, aluminium companies frequently issue media releases about new technologies and uses for recycling the material, such as brickmaking, road construction or even agricultural fertilizer. None of these have come to fruition beyond prototyping and minor experiments sponsored by the industry itself. Research projects to develop land rehabilitation and growth of meadowlands on top of the material have met with little success. A failed attempt was made in a planning application for an incinerator at nearby Irish Cement to burn the waste at high temperatures in 2017. Concerns about toxic substances seeping into the local groundwater have frequently been discussed by local farmers groups, concerned inhabitants and environmentalists.
This image, taken in 2014 sees the expansion of a piping system in the bauxite residue to implement a water sprinkling system, necessary to keep dust from drying, rising and spreading on dry and windy days throughout the locale. The waste contains toxic chemicals such as arsenic, barium, beryllium, boron, cadmium, cobalt, gallium, lead, thallium, thorium and uranium. It was classified as hazardous for years until Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency and the EU began to define it as ‘non-hazardous’ since 2003, following extensive lobbying by the aluminium industry.
In October 2010 at a similar facility in Ajka, Hungary, a red mud storage area breeched its walls after weeks of heavy rain. It flooded two nearby villages, causing ten deaths and apocalyptic destruction to nature and local ecology. With its high alkaline levels, the mud effected over a hundred individuals with chemical burns serious enough to require hospitalisation. By 2024, techniques of ploughing and compacting the waste are more evident on the surface of the residue in Aughinish, as its’ height increases over the surrounding landscape. As of the publication of this website, a planning application has been relodged with An Bord Pleanála to raise the height of the toxic fields to 44 metres.
Front page of a 1994 issue of AAL News, an in-house publication made for Aughinish Alumina employees. The editorial offers a hard rebuttal to incidences of airborne dispersal of ‘red dust’ throughout the Shannon Estuary area. Both at Aughinish and other alumina refineries worldwide, such a phenomenon has been regularly recorded. In modern aluminium production, thousands of acres of chemical residue are spread over the landscape, open to the elements. Water sprinklers located throughout the landscape try to keep its surface moist. Yet, on dry windy days, dust is known to rise and sweep into the air, to gather softly on car windscreens and the gable ends of houses miles away. It falls in gardens and hedgerows, on livestock, rivers and lakes. The refinery has rarely taken responsibility for this, but rather points to freak weather conditions in the Sahara Desert. Their public relations officer here maintained that storms in North Africa lift reddish sand particles up out of the ground to ten thousand feet into the air. These clouds of sand are then pushed by very strong winds, move across Europe to Ireland, where contact with moist Atlantic air forces the sand downwards into the vicinity of the Shannon Estuary. While inhalation of the red dust is primarily considered an irritant according to medical professionals, prolonged exposure leads to respiratory ailments and pulmonary disease.
In a series of rooms behind the main reception at Aughinish, educational displays are presented, laid out for school groups and interested visitors to familarise themselves with the scale and ambition of the aluminium industry. There, a model of the refinery and its hinterland inaccurately represents the current scale and colour of the ‘red field’ nearby. The display is permanently closed to the public since COVID lockdowns.
A 2007 Google Earth image of Aughinish Alumina and its surrounds, then a novel mapping technique made with satellite technology and placed on web browsers. For an unaccounted reason, the ‘red’ field of chemical residue to the south of the refinery appears as the colour grey. It is unknown if the refinery requested this change, or who might have suggested this alteration that makes less visual impact. While Google offers a privacy setting to blur out houses and buildings on Google Streetview, such a function has never been officially available in their Google Earth programme, often drawing criticism from businesses or companies whose activities beyond their main entrance gate can now be observed from on high.
On a printed brochure advertising the Nature Trails of RUSAL Aughinish, a heavily-photoshopped image assembles species of birds, butterflies and a fox into West Limerick surroundings. They are now put to work, like actors on a stage, to theatrically present a proposition about harmony between nature and industry. The refinery’s presence is signified by a solitary smokestack in the background, poking up above a blooming whitethorn bush.
While the trail itself has been reduced in size with the continuing expansion of the refinery, there still exists several artistic illustrations of a ‘natural’ landscape, while signage on the walking routes are authored by the refinery and remind visitors not to litter, a request hard to take seriously with millions of tonnes of toxic waste nearby.
An alternative interpretation might occur in light of Bord Pleanála, Ireland’s planning authority, overturning RUSAL’s major expansion plans in 2023, noting that environmental and natural heritage of the area was not correctly addressed in their original application and bringing about a reality of potential closure of the plant by the end of the 2020s. With the grouping of creatures here, it could be a prediction nature is beginning to take back its terrain.
In an effort to create a more seemingly picturesque view, rows of topiary have been planted in front of filtration tanks at the southside of the facility. The plants are dwarfed by the scale of the refinery behind, creating an uneasy juxtaposition. There have been many landscaping proposals of a similar ilk mooted throughout the years – local community representatives from the nearby town of Askeaton remember an unfulfilled promise made during the 1990s that the red field of chemical waste would be covered over and turned into a municipal golf course after 25 years of operation.
A picnic bench is today located in hinterland at the east of the refinery and is another attempt at blending the complex into the landscape. Westerly winds frequently blow a caustic stench over here, the result of the high-heat calcination processes going on nearby. Breathing in leaves a metallic taste and smell in your mouth and nostrils for several hours after visiting the location.
Entrance sign for the now defunct butterfly sanctuary located at Aughinish Alumina, salvaged from the site in 2022.
Acknowledged as Ireland’s first officially-designated butterfly sanctuary, a wildflower meadow, rare heath habitat and rocky limestone outcrops inside a disused quarry all encouraged the presence of native butterflies. A key part of the refinery’s efforts to be perceived as a benign and sympathetic force towards its hinterland and nature, copious amounts of signage nearby directed the public there to enjoy Red Admirals, Painted Ladies and more species during summer months. With expansion of operations on the neighbouring Bauxite Residue Disposal Area infringing on the site, the facility was closed down in 2020 with the erection of steel fences around. A peregrine falcon watch point close by is also no longer accessible.
Photographs taken in 2017 by Birmingham-based artist Stuart Whipps, as part of the project If Wishes Were Thrushes, Beggars Would Eat Birds. Exploring the histories of plants and minerals in different parts of the world, Whipps arrived unannounced at the refinery and, after explaining his interests, was surprisingly given access by friendly security staff to administrative corridors and some empty offices spaces, and left to explore it alone. This gave him a rare opportunity to document some of Aughinish Alumina’s day-to-day inner workings – typically employees and subcontractors at the refinery are forbidden to take or disseminate images made with their phone while working onsite.
Processing of mineral ore, flow of capital, shaping of societies and environments in the Shannon region and beyond, and the everyday ubiquitous use of aluminium is hard to fully represent in a photograph. Knowing this, Whipps’ approach looks for a subtle reading, an arcane connection that could illuminate these issues. In his images, he took an interest in the refinery’s office plants, mostly of a tropical persuasion, left untended in various nooks and crannies of the building. In particular, several sad-looking Begonias were seen. The species was first brought by a French bureaucrat Michel Begon from modern-day Haiti to Europe back in 1689. Whipps considers it an exile, far away from its natural habitat, a journey echoed in the movement of bauxite ore from mines in Guinea to present-day Aughinish.
Chiming with Whipps’ images, Elaine Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson and Nils Bubant’s edited 2017 publication Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet notes that,
As humans reshape the landscape, we forget what was there before. Ecologists call this forgetting the ‘shifting baseline syndrome.’ Our newly shaped and ruined landscapes become the new reality. Admiring one landscape and its biological entanglements often entails forgetting many others. Forgetting, in itself, remakes landscapes, as we privilege some assemblages over others. Yet ghosts remind us. Ghosts point to our forgetting, showing us how living landscapes are imbued with earlier tracks and traces.
View of the refinery with dairy agriculture in the foreground, taken from 1993’s promotional video Aughinish and The Environment.
In the mid 1990s, hundreds of horses and cows were dying on farms located in the shadow of the plant. A four-year investigation by Ireland’s Environmental Protection Agency found no relationship between deformed agricultural livestock, local health, toxic deposits and harmful caustic emissions emitted through large smokestacks nearby. Instead of attributing blame to an industry that is a major economic force and large employer in the region, the report chastised the ignorance of local farmers, claiming that they must have given cheap inadequate feed to their herds, resulting in infection, disease, and death. Several independently-funded academic reports found otherwise, and inevitably attributed causality to the refinery’s activities.
An image of the Limerick Leader newspaper in 2001, screen-grabbed from Facebook, details an exasperated community meeting in Askeaton Community Hall on environmental issues in the region, and the publishing of a government report exonerating the refinery from any environmental wrongdoing.
Twenty years later, in 2021, I wrote,
‘Remnants of these experiences live forever in a community, raw and disturbing stains that, no matter how many ‘good news’ stories come through (usually generated through economic achievement or corporate spin), cannot conceal the ugly that remains on the surface and in the air. This is what eco-anxiety is, like Shakespeare’s well-known character Lady MacBeth, uttering the line “Out damned spot,” in a play I studied for my Leaving Certificate examination in a school and in a community shadowed by an industrial demon. In Robert Allen’s 2004 essay ‘Askeaton: In the Shadow of the Dragon’, he lays out concerns about the impact such an industry has on the ecology of the area, seeping into all aspects from flora to fauna to human life, and evocatively quotes playwright Walter Macken,
In large communities it is called rumour but in small communities it is knowing. You cannot hide real events and call them by another name, because men are not fools and if you give them the evidence of their ears and eyes, and even with a minimum of intelligence, they can piece together all the facts.’
Independent journalism, seen here in The Phoenix magazine in 2022, continue to examine the refinery’s operations. Since 2007, Aughinish is controlled from corporate headquarters in Moscow and part of a global infrastructure of Russian-owed interests. The current state of play, discussing the possibility of economic sanctions, political agency, light touch regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency and the role of the factory as a major polluter are all addressed in this succinct article.
In 2006 Aughinish was presented with a special award from Sustainable Energy Ireland (SEI), for ‘its outstanding contribution in the area of Energy Management.’ Despite that, its carbon emissions that year topped 1,447,000 tonnes. Today, despite year-on-year reductions, the the single-biggest source of 2023 emissions outside of the ESB and state-owned electricity generation was Aughinish, polluting 1,015,332 tonnes of carbon.
Rita O’Reilly’s in-depth report on RTE’s Primetime broadcast 13 April 2022 revealed links between Rusal Aughinish and military manufacturing. In light of the war in Ukraine and profits from the refinery being reinvested into the Russian war machine, O’Reilly’s investigation pointed to financial documents of Kremlin-connected businesses and banks that control Aughinish. A series of interlinked companies were detailed in the broadcast to illustrate the complex movement of finance involving Oleg Deripaska, a billionaire oligarch, once owner and still prominent shareholder in Rusal Aughinish. The Russian military is the top client of a number of his companies, and he owns a military hardware firm that makes armoured vehicles used by Russian forces in Ukraine.
In November 2011, Deripaska demonstrated the BTR-82A, one of the company’s armoured personnel carriers, to Mr Putin on a visit to a plant operated by Gaz Group, a sister company also controlled by the oligarch.
Footage reviewed by Yohann Michel, a military equipment expert at the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) in London, shows the BTR-82A vehicle firing with a canon on the streets of the besieged Ukrainian city of Mariupol in March 2022. Michel also identified the BTR-82A in other footage from Ukraine, as well as another armoured vehicle, the Tigr, which is also manufactured by one of Deripaska’s companies. The vehicle can be mounted with missile launchers and machine guns.
During the week of the Primetime programme, Ukrainian president Volodymr Zelensky addressed the Oireachtas and pleaded with Ireland to show more leadership on sanctions. ‘I would like to ask you to convince EU partners to introduce more rigid sanctions against Russia to make sure the Russian war machine will stop’, he said. Responding to the Aughinish link, junior minister and Limerick County TD Patrick O’Donovan told Primetime that there were ‘no hiding places in relation to those who have any associations with a Russian war machine.’ However, the government did not make any assertive actions. Discussions around nationalising the plant, or seeking other aluminium producing companies with no Kremlin connection to operate Aughinish have come to nothing. Gradually, the situation has faded in terms of media attention and newsfeeds.
‘Who are FutureProof Clare?
We are a small group of activists based in County Clare, concerned about the impact of heavy industry and unexamined modern life on the living world – here in Clare and globally. We strive for environmental, climate and social justice. We do this by informing ourselves, creating public awareness, celebrating nature and by calling out and challenging systematic failures, injustices and looming threats.
Our first and ongoing campaign was against the building of a Liquified Natural Gas terminal in the Shannon Estuary – Shannon LNG – intended for importation of US fracked gas to fuel Ireland and the EU. We are also currently involved with/lead campaigns concerning:
• Aughinish Alumina expansion – saving the area and people on the River Shannon Estuary from more toxic waste.
• Stopping Ireland from becoming a fossil fuel powered Data Centre hub.
• Tulla/Clare/Ireland anti-mining campaign, fighting the prospecting/mining licenses being granted throughout this country.
An exciting new development for us is getting involved in an international movement pushing for the recognition of the Rights of Nature and from our own initiative, for The Rights of the River Shannon. Ireland could be at the forefront in Europe in establishing large scale grassroots momentum to push for change. It’s long overdue and the time to do it is NOW.
Why join Futureproof Clare?
• Experience – we’ve got it. We know how legislation and campaigning works. We have a great reputation for science-based, meticulous work and powerful communications.
• We’re connected. We operate in a web of great activists spanning the globe.’
Futureproof Clare Press Release 8 May 2023:
Futureproof Clare (FPC) have won a High Court Case to prevent expansion of Co. Limerick based aluminium refinery Aughinish Alumina. The grassroots environmental group challenged An Bord Pleanála's decision to grant permission to expand the waste disposal area of the Russian-owned facility near the banks of the Shannon Estuary. An Bord Pleanála (ABP) conceded the case on the basis of one of the points in FPC’s statement of grounds which noted the failure of ABP to take into account An Taisce's submission to the board.
Eoin Brady, solicitor of FP Logue representing FPC explained:
‘This is a significant result for Futureproof Clare, who had considerable concerns with regard to the process by which An Bord Pleanála granted permission for what would in effect be an extension in the duration of the Aughinish Alumina facility, with an increase in the associated environmental emissions and waste created and deposited on the banks of the Shannon Estuary. It shows the important role that judicial review plays in ensuring that those with responsibility for carrying out environmental assessment of major industrial development such as that at Aughinish do so in a legally compliant way.’
‘This is a hugely important result, because it’s the first time that the operations of Rusal at Aughinish Alumina have ever been struck down in the Courts’, said Sinéad Shehan of FPC. ‘However, while Rusal are still operating, we cannot rest. We believe that there are more serious environmental issues around the operation of the refinery that need to be challenged and we intend to hold Rusal, and those responsible for overseeing and consenting their continued operations, to account’. According to Emma Karran of FPC, ‘Aughinish Alumina has been in operation for around 40 years and during this time has produced millions of tonnes of environmental waste and laid them on the banks of the River Shannon in close proximity to a Special Area of Conservation. At this time of environmental crisis with the awareness of the increasing problem of river pollution in Ireland, we cannot stand back and silently witness the continued build up of bauxite waste within metres of the Shannon estuary. If the refinery resubmits the application to expand its waste disposal area, we will continue to resist it. The proper course of action now for Rusal and the various competent authorities is to wind down operations at the facility and begin the proper remediation of the massive waste stockpile and the contaminated land on Aughinish island.’
Along with applying to the national Environmental Protection Agency for licenses to conduct various industrial activities in Aughinish, Rusal must publish any future infrastructure plans in newspapers to give public notice.
In late 2023, a proposal to load up dredged material from around the refinery’s jetty and pier and dump it a distance away in the waters of the Shannon Estuary came under further scrutiny. Following a successful High Court appeal that overturned the potential expansion of the refinery’s chemical and bauxite waste earlier that year, environmental groups again intervened. Environmental Trust Ireland, based in Limerick, wrote to the EPA noting that RUSAL’s licence application stealthily appeared only in a small regional newspaper that did not circulate in many areas, therefore denying a wider public a chance to make submissions on the application.
Futureproof Clare’s Emanuela Ferrari noted that ‘If the EPA grants Aughinish this licence to dredge and dump, it will amount to the equivalent of 5,000 double-decker buses of potentially contaminated muddy sand every year. All this has potential detrimental effects on the wildlife in the area, which is one of the most important sites within Europe for bottlenose dolphins’. A new licence would green light dumping of 668,454 tonnes over the next eight years, a significant increase on the current permit, which allows the refinery to dump up to 128,000 tonnes. Environmental Trust Ireland additionally noted a concern that, despite Aughinish wanting a more than five-fold increase in dumping volume, there has been ‘no justification offered for this massive increase’. One might speculate that the areas around the refinery’s jetty where bauxite and alumina are moved in and out on a long conveyor belt are now so built up, following forty years of constant production, that expediated dredging is urgently required to maintain efficient operations.
The EPA subsequently wrote to Rusal, requiring it to publish a new notice in newspapers with broader circulation. A decision on the permit is currently pending.
These images detail the process of taking a heavy metal test and subsequent results, conducted on my body, a woman in her forties. I have lived half my life four kilometres east of Aughinish Alumina, and the results point to high levels of aluminium and associated medical issues.
The test is conducted on a clinically-approved Oligoscan. This device is gently pressed on four points on the palm of the hand. Using spectrophotometry, light beams determine the intensity of the electromagnetic signals of 36 different minerals and metals stored in body tissue.