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ireland
Lessons for Everyone from the Irish Farmer Protests
The demonstrations in Ireland still show how small-scale protests driven by economic malaise can get national attention and prompt change.
Apr 28, 2026
Can anything make farmers turn away from President Donald Trump?
How right-wing populism has gripped rural areas, especially among farmers, is evidenced by the results from the past few presidential elections.
Still, critical challenges are emerging for key constituencies in Trump's base, principally due to the damage that the Iran War is doing in the countryside. Similar conditions pushed Irish farmers to the streets in early April, causing a change among political leadership shortly after, and also helping producers receive some much-needed relief.
That Irish farmers took to the streets shouldn't surprise folks. Earlier this year in January, some of them were also demonstrating, but against the EU-Mercosur trade deal. Not too long ago in 2024, their counterparts across the English Channel throughout many European countries staged weeks of actions to protest free trade deals and excessive bureaucratic regulations. Outside of Europe, in Mexico beginning in 2025 and continuing into 2026, farmers, for many of the same reasons, are blocking roads to demand government intervention to address falling prices for their produce.
The Iran War is placing unnecessary stress on farmers and most other working people. Such conditions are similar to those in Ireland, which led farmers to find common cause with others.
Taking a quick glance at these recent protests taking place around the world, farmers in the United States seem to be asleep at the wheel as producers in many other countries are taking control by challenging their governments and calling for economic justice.
It is not the case that farmers in the US are living large.
In 2025, farm bankruptcies rose by 46% compared with 2024. In 2026, even though there appears to be some movement in a positive direction concerning prices for corn and soy farmers, the jump in what they have to pay for fuel and fertilizer caused by how the Iran War devastates global supply chains is eating into their profits.
Making matters worse, the fertilizer industry is heavily concentrated. A standard metric for measuring concentration—the four-firm concentration ratio (CR4)—shows that the leading four companies in fertilizer markets control about 75% of sales. When that figure is above 40% within a certain industry, according to researchers, then illegal practices such as price-fixing become endemic and consumers pay more than they should at the register. Put simply, the negative economic impacts from the Iran War are compounded by an industry looking for excuses to further jack up prices.
Meanwhile, the current version of the Farm Bill in Congress woefully fails to meet the needs of a farm economy facing crisis.
First, pricing policy to support farmers was decided last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) when the surge in input prices was not on the political radar. Adding insult to injury for our food and farm system, the OBBB also cut food assistance support and climate change initiatives. Speaking to problems farmers are facing, nowhere in the current Farm Bill do we find any discussion of taking on corporate power. Investing in transitioning farms to small-scale, young producers is also mainly an afterthought in the legislation. How hundreds of agribusiness commodity groups support the current version of the legislation, while as many small-scale producer-led groups have voiced opposition, is testament to the fact that our farm policy is about propping up export markets instead of feeding Americans and creating resilient systems.
Trump’s billion-dollar handout to large-scale, mainly high-income farmers at the start of the Iran conflict shows an administration not concerned with sustaining our food system, but with padding the pockets of rich elite allies.
Farmers in Ireland faced similar challenges and felt that they had no choice but to go to the streets. Their actions, drawing comparisons to France’s yellow vests movement, also boasted no clear leaders. In locally organized, spontaneous actions, groups from April 7 to 14 mobilized by blockading strategic oil refineries as well as slowing down traffic on key streets and highways.
Their mobilizations bore some fruit. First, they managed to secure a short-term relief package in the form of direct payments to offset rising fuel costs. Politically, they also caused some political shifts, driving leaders to leave the governing coalition in opposition to how the farmers were treated. While short of generating long-lasting structural change, the demonstrations in Ireland still show how small-scale protests driven by economic malaise can get national attention and prompt change.
Perhaps more importantly for US farmers is how the Irish managed to overcome their relative isolation in society and mobilize with others. Particularly, Irish producers brought truckers to their side, which aided with their efforts at creating roadblocks and slowdowns. Their interests also were aligned, as truckers also have been negatively impacted by rising fuel prices.
With a Farm Bill widely maligned working its way through Congress, legislators have apparently decided to forget about making meaningful changes to our food and farm system. Meanwhile, the Iran War is placing unnecessary stress on farmers and most other working people. Such conditions are similar to those in Ireland, which led farmers to find common cause with others. Now is as good as any other for their counterparts in the US to say enough is enough and denounce a rigged economy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.
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Human Rights Groups Demand Ireland Stop Letting Trump Use Airport for 'Unlawful' ICE Flights
"If Ireland is facilitating the monstrous ICE project, then we fear the government has lost its way. Rather than cower and capitulate, it must show courage, compassion, and principle," said the head of Amnesty International Ireland.
Apr 16, 2026
A pair of human rights groups on Thursday called for the Irish government to stop letting the administration of US President Donald Trump use Shannon Airport as a refueling stop for Immigration and Customs Enforcement's deportation flights.
In a joint letter to Ireland’s transport minister, Darragh O’Brien, and foreign affairs and trade minister, Helen McEntee, Amnesty International Ireland and Human Rights First urged the Irish government to stop cooperating with President Donald Trump's efforts to deport migrants to third countries.
Using data from its ICE Flight Monitor, Human Rights First determined that Shannon Airport has been used to refuel deportation planes during at least five of these removal operations, which involved what the groups described as "transfers of individuals to countries... they have no ties to and where they have faced arbitrary and prolonged detention and other abuse."
After one of the flights in May 2025, eight migrants from several countries, including Cuba, Mexico, Myanmar, Laos, Vietnam, and Sudan—some of whom had legally been resettled as refugees—were dropped in the East African nation of Djibouti. There, they were held in a shipping container at a US base for at least six weeks before being sent to war-torn South Sudan, where they were promptly detained by authorities. Six of them remain in detention today, with little ability to communicate with their lawyers.
Another group of five men from Cuba, Yemen, Vietnam, and Laos was taken to the southern African country of Eswatini in July. Four of them remain in state custody more than eight months later, despite the authorities giving no official reason for their ongoing detention.
Another flight stopped in Ireland on its way back from dumping eight Palestinian men, who were shackled for the entire journey, on the side of the road in the occupied West Bank. Some of the men had green cards in the United States, and several had wives and children from whom they had been forcibly separated, despite facing no accusations of having committed a crime. Two such flights have taken place.
In total, the groups found that at least 28 migrants had traveled through the Shannon Airport on their way to third countries.
About 300 migrants have been sent to third countries as part of the Trump administration's "mass deportation" campaign, according to a February report by Democrats on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
The administration has spent more than $40 million, part of which has gone to countries willing to take in deportees, including Equatorial Guinea, Rwanda, El Salvador, Eswatini, and Palau, each of which has received multimillion-dollar lump sums.
Most infamously, the administration last year secretly sent more than 280 young men, most without criminal records, to the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), a megaprison in El Salvador, where they were subjected to torture and cut off from communication with their families and lawyers for more than four months before a judge ordered most of them released.Amnesty and Human Rights First have described this practice as a form of "enforced disappearance" under international law.
"To carry out its mass deportation campaign, the Trump administration is flouting international law and cutting deals with dictators. It is also endangering lives, through its opaque web of third country agreements to send people against their will to countries where they have no connection”, said Uzra Zeya, the CEO of Human Rights First.
“Beyond their cruelty, these agreements reflect a transactional foreign policy driven by xenophobia, and they undermine due process and human rights globally," she said. "Ireland should play no part in facilitating these unlawful removals, including to third countries notorious for rights abuses.”
Shannon Airport has become a target of protest over its use as a hub for American military planes, which many in Ireland see as an affront to the country's long history of military neutrality. It has previously come under scrutiny for helping transport detainees renditioned for torture by the CIA during the post-9/11 global War on Terror.
Last week, a man was arrested for allegedly breaking into the facility and damaging a US military plane that was en route to a bilateral military exercise in Poland, according to The New York Times. Though no motive has been made public, the incident evoked other acts of vandalism by anti-war activists opposed to the US military presence.
"People across Ireland and the world look on in horror as the Trump administration continues implementing its vile, racist, and xenophobic executive orders that dehumanize and criminalize people who are, or are perceived to be, migrants and refugees. The administration has brazenly violated the right to due process by unlawfully removing people and subjecting some to enforced disappearance,” said Stephen Bowen, the executive director of Amnesty International Ireland.
Following a request last month for it to stop US deportation flights from using Shannon to refuel, Ireland’s Department of Transport contended that under the 1944 Chicago Convention on International Civil Aviation, US aircraft do not require permission to refuel at Shannon. Transport Minister O’Brien has said the US did not request authorization for the flights to land and that his department had no knowledge of them.
But Bowen says that even though states are not required to obtain permission to land, the convention still requires them to abide by international law, and that the Irish government ultimately has the power to decide how its sovereign airspace is used.
“The Department of Transport’s public responses are just not good enough,” he said. “There are depressing parallels with Ireland’s failure two decades ago to stop CIA-leased civil aircraft using Shannon as a stopover for rendition operations during the US ‘War on Terror’. Despite promises to ‘enforce the prohibition on the use of Irish airspace, airports, and related facilities for purposes not in line with the dictates of international law’, it appears that no concrete actions were ever taken.”
“The government’s timidity in its dealings with President Trump is already a cause for concern," Bowen added. "If Ireland is facilitating the monstrous ICE project, then we fear the government has lost its way. Rather than cower and capitulate, it must show courage, compassion, and principle."
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Big Tech Faces More Probes Over AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material
"These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters," said the Spanish president. "The state cannot allow it. The impunity of the giants must end."
Feb 17, 2026
Big Tech firms are coming under greater scrutiny for the proliferation of child sexual abuse material generated by artificial intelligence-powered chatbots on their social media platforms.
Ireland's Data Protection Commission (DPC) announced on Tuesday that it was invoking the European Union's data privacy regulations to open an investigation into Grok, the AI chatbot featured on Elon Musk's X platform, after it was used to generate nonconsensual deepfake images, including sexualized images of children.
In announcing the investigation, DPC Deputy Commissioner Graham Doyle said that the commission has been in contact with X for weeks after reports first emerged of Grok being used to generate child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Doyle said DPC has since decided to launch "a large-scale inquiry which will examine [X's] compliance with some of their fundamental obligations" under European privacy laws.
Spanish President Pedro Sánchez said on Tuesday that his government would ask Spain's Public Prosecution Service to "investigate the crimes that X, Meta, and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI."
"These platforms are attacking the mental health, dignity, and rights of our sons and daughters," Sánchez emphasized. "The state cannot allow it. The impunity of the giants must end."
The probes announced by Ireland and Spain mark just the latest actions by European governments against US-based tech giants. Earlier in February, law enforcement authorities in France raided the office of X in Paris, which the Paris prosecutor’s office said was part of an investigation aimed at "ensuring that the X platform complies with French laws, insofar as it operates on national territory."
The UK government's Information Commissioner's Office has also announced an investigation into X that the agency said encompasses "their processing of personal data in relation to the Grok artificial intelligence system and its potential to produce harmful sexualized image and video content."
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