The Real Class Politics Behind Ireland’s Fuel Protests
by Conor McCabe
The Protests and their Misreaders
On 7 April 2026 a group of road haulers and agricultural contractors began blocking roads and motorways across Ireland in a protest against rising fuel costs. The intensity and militancy of their actions caught everyone by surprise. Dublin’s O’Connell Street was occupied for five days, seriously affecting public transport. Access to Whitegate oil refinery and Galway port was also restricted, threatening fuel supplies. Talks were held with official farming and haulage associations, but the protestors themselves were excluded from meetings. Finally, on the morning of 12 April, the police removed all barricades nationally and cleared O’Connell Street. The same day the government announced a €500m support package. Attempts were made by some protestors to continue but they were quickly arrested and the country moved back to normal.
The events dominated the news in the days and weeks that followed, but any hope of deciphering the material conditions behind the protests was lost under a clamour of clickable opinions, where interpretation overtook evidence. A largely representative piece was penned by Irish Times columnist Fintan O’Toole, who disparaged those involved as an entitled “breakfast roll-atariat,” a “HGV Soviet” of far-right misogynists out to destroy the state [1]. Indeed, even less vitriolic pieces tended to highlight the anti-immigrant and racist voices that tended to shout the loudest [2].
The labelling was assisted, unfortunately, by the protestors themselves, who lacked a single set of demands, chopping and changing from a cap on prices to stipulations for new oil drills off the west coast of Ireland. Initially they said that they would go home once the government agreed to meet them. When told (wrongly) that the government had accepted this demand, they announced that this was not enough and that they would leave only when they got what they wanted. The bravado elicited cheers on O’Connell Street, but in reality the organisers had shown their cards: they had no real strategy, no real plan, and no new ideas, caught instead in a cascade of social media likes and shares.
Grass Into Profit: The Logic of Irish Dairy
As a result, the fuel protests ended with the government talking only to the official farming and road haulage organisations. The deal struck spoke to these sectoral interests above all else. The protests, though, in general, had deep roots and causes. They shine a light on the way agricultural goods are produced in Ireland. Any understanding of those issues requires delving into the materialist dynamics of Irish farming, which does not provide the food in our supermarkets so much as provide milk and cattle for dairy processors, slaughterhouses, and exporters. Ireland imports around 80 percent [3] of its animal feed, food, and beverage needs, while exporting 90 percent of its beef and dairy products. This is not because of some Ricardian comparative advantage [4] but done to deliver gains for very particular sectoral interests, facilitated by state policy over the past twenty years to maximise dairy output above all else.
The grass-fed system which underpins Irish dairy is land-hungry and fertiliser-dependent, increasingly pushing out other competitors for land. It is a pasture-based farming method where dairy and beef cattle receive at least 90 percent of their diet from fresh grass, silage and hay. The animals can spend up to 300 days a year [5] grazing outdoors, with indoor winter feed supplemented with grain feed. Sheep farming is usually left out of the equation, although “Ireland’s strength in sheep production,” according to Teagasc, [6] “lies in its ability to produce meat from an almost entirely grass-based diet.”
Dairy farmers are paid by the co-operatives and processors for the level of fat and protein solids per KG of milk. Ireland’s grass-fed system tends to lead to relatively high concentrations of both: in 2024, for example, the annual percentage [7] of fat and protein content in Irish milk was 4.36 and 3.55 percent respectively, fourth-highest in the EU. However, where Ireland falls down is in terms of total yearly milk yield per cow, which at c.5,300 kg is significantly below [8] the EU average of 8,120 kg. This is due, in part, to the seasonal dynamic of the grass-fed system, which is structured around a spring calving pattern to match the grass growth curve.
The overall goal (regardless of animal) is to transform grass into profit, and 87 percent [9] of Irish agricultural land is devoted to this enterprise, across dairy, beef, and other grazing livestock farms. Its logic is maintained, enforced and reproduced by key nodal institutions: dairy processors, exporters, banks, state agencies and government departments. There is no one person pulling all the strings, no single capitalist tweeting instructions.
The centrality of dairy to this system in Ireland is comparatively new in historical terms, but the logic of grass to profit is an old one, and until the early 1980s it was overshadowed by live cattle and beef processing. Since then, dairy (under the protective arm of the EU and CAP) has come to the fore. From 1984 to 2015 it operated under a milk quota system, which limited output. However, with a guaranteed price and purchaser in the EU, creameries and co-ops were able to consolidate and expand. When the quota was lifted the Minister for Agriculture, Simon Coveney, said it was like “removing a straitjacket” and that the ambition was for Ireland to become a world dairy producer. “Increased output will be exported” he said, “and demand will be driven by global demographics – increasing population, increasing affluence and the urbanisation and westernisation of diet in developing economies. I am working closely with state agencies and industry, to further increase market opportunities.” [10] It was and remains an indigenous sector, dominated by key multinational exporters such as the Kerry Group, Ornua, Tirlán, Dairygold and Lakeland Dairies.
The Contractors’ Squeeze
Key to the system are agricultural contractors. They are a crucial component of the grass-fed chain, providing heavy machinery and related labour at critical times of the year. They also help manage heavy workloads in silage harvesting and slurry spreading, which allows farmers to forgo investment in heavy machinery and avoid associated depreciation costs. The challenges faced by the contractors in providing this service are multifaceted and made all the worse by their present exclusion from policy formation. Yet responsibility for the time-sensitive targets at the heart of national policy is carried in no small part by agricultural contractors who are struggling to make repayments on loans for the necessary heavy machinery.
While there have always been agricultural contractors, their prominence in the grass-fed system has increased in recent years. Since the lifting of the milk quota in 2015 there has been a significant shift away from individual farm machinery ownership and towards the greater use of agricultural contractor services [11].
According to the Department of Agriculture, the average contractor uses around 70,000 litres of diesel a year [12]. This means that for every €0.01 rise in the cost of green diesel, €700 is added to their annual expenditure. In July 2025 [13] marked gas oil (“green diesel”) cost around €1.017 per litre. As of 1 June 2026, it cost €1.361 – a rise of €0.344, or €24,080 a year for the average contractor. In March 2026 Agriland reported that [14] the cost of harvesting 100 acres of silage ground with a full self propelled unit had increased by €2,855 plus vat per day, with a single tractor costing an additional €237 per day in diesel costs.
On top of this, dairy farmers are currently receiving milk prices from processors that are below the cost of production [15]. Climate change is leading to wetter springs and summers, affecting silage harvesting times – which in turn have a knock-on effect on milk production. It is no surprise that the Association of Farm and Forestry Contractors in Ireland (FCI) said [16] that the fuel income support scheme, while welcome, “is only a splash in the pan for farm and forestry contracting, a sector which is becoming less and less viable every year.” It recommended that its members increase their prices by 20 percent “in order to survive the crisis and have a sustainable future for their business.” Other cost pressures include electricity, oil, spare parts, new machinery and insurance which have all increased significantly in recent years.
Looked at in its totality, the agricultural contractor’s economic class position within the grass-fed system of production is complex: they possess their own tools and materials and are considered as self-employed contractors, but who are beholden to targets and deadlines shaped, to a significant degree, by those in control of the platform. They are in effect, price‑takers, and while they have the freedom to say no to certain jobs, in reality they have limited options. The loans they have drawn down act as a coercive mechanism, compelling them to accept work and prices that they may otherwise have refused. Their self-employed independence is somewhat of a formality. The structure that governs them has some similarities to that of a gig-economy platform. There is no app and no tracking, but to see these as the defining elements of platform work is to fetishize the tools and miss the economic class relations that flow through them. These are lost when the contractor is framed primarily as an independent smallholder of capital.
Reading the Protests Right
There are significant materialist class relations, therefore, enveloping the grass-fed system of production that are not captured through lenses of social class or cultural capital. Very often, the contractor is also a farmer and is working part-time. It is only when they are placed in relation to the co-ops and processors that the antagonisms reveal themselves. They are not the independent smallholder “breakfast-roll-atariat” of O’Toole’s imagination. They are a form of debt-burdened asset-owner class, with limited control over the timing, duration, pace and price of their work. These tensions have produced a potent mix of genuine grievance and reactionary politics. The oft-used phrase, squeezed middle, may indeed apply here – not in the mainstream media meaning of cost-of-living and prices, but rather in terms of position-of-production and power. There is of course a qualitative difference between a pushbike and heavy goods vehicle, but when seen in terms of mode and relations of production that difference somewhat fades.
It is entirely possible to look at the fuel protests and see only a far-right bandwagon, but this would be a mistake. There is a need for an objective, materialist reading of the mode and relations of production in Irish agriculture, more now than ever, in order to get to the heart of the antagonisms beneath the fuel cost catalyst. The protests can act as a way in to what those relations actually look like in motion, as long as the bandwagon bingo sheet is left at the door.
Notes
Fintan O'Toole, 'Ireland's far-right movement will emerge from the "breakfast roll-atariat"', Irish Times, 14 April 2026.
Colin Murphy, 'On O'Connell Street, far-right figures were hitching their wagons to the tractors', Irish Independent, April 2026.
US International Trade Administration, 'Ireland – Agricultural Sector', Ireland Country Commercial Guide.
David A. Moss, 'An Economic Principle For Us All: Comparative Advantage', Harvard Business School Working Knowledge, 22 October 2014.
Bord Bia, 'Grass-Fed Livestock', Origin Green.
Teagasc, Finishing Store Lambs (2017).
Eurostat, 'Fat and protein content in cows' milk', Data Browser.
Eurostat, 'Milk and milk product statistics', Statistics Explained.
Eurostat, 'Utilised agricultural area by categories', Data Browser.
Simon Coveney, quoted in 'Milk quota abolition – the most fundamental change to Irish agriculture in a generation', Agriland, April 2015.
Handcock, R. 'Evaluating the Role and Impact of Agricultural Contracting in Ireland: Challenges, Opportunities and Future Prospects'. Thesis, Dundalk Institute of Technology. 2026.
Department of Agriculture, quoted in 'Fuel scheme payment of €650 for farmers and €6,000 for contractors', Irish Farmers Journal, 22 May 2026.
'Green diesel settles at just over €1.01/l', Irish Farmers Journal, 23 July 2025.
'Watch: 100ac of silage set to cost €2,855 extra as diesel soars', Agriland, 25 March 2026.
'No justification for further reductions in milk prices', Agriland, 6 February 2026.
Farm and Forestry Contractors Ireland (FCI), 'FCI Statement on Launch of Fuel Income Support Scheme.