From toxic industries to green extractivism: rural environmental struggles, multinational corporations and Ireland’s postcolonial ecological regime

Abstract

This article articulates the historical entanglement of Ireland’s big tech ecosystem with earlier forms of economic development and state-sanctioned polluting practices, particularly focusing on strategies for attracting multinational companies since the 1960s. The outsourcing of polluting multinational industries to Ireland’s rural regions has a long history, one tied into fault-lines of the country’s postcolonial condition and developmental economy in the 1970s and 1980s. During this era of economic liberalisation, Ireland’s environmental politics were frequently organised against the outsourcing of toxic chemical, pharmaceutical, and technological industries to rural Ireland. Ireland’s position as a western European nation-state undoubtedly means that wealth accumulated via these industries merits complicity in the global supply chains sustaining “green” extractivism in the Global South. But rural Ireland also bears an uneven share of responsibility for these industries, whose destructive externalities are often imposed on these places through large-scale infrastructures. Historical struggles for environmental justice in these rural sites foreground access to land, livelihoods, health, and cultures of place. Contributing to recent debates on the colonial endurances of contemporary “green” development, we argue that these rural movements should be a starting point for a “just” transition attuned to anti-imperialist goals in Ireland.