Army engineers helped to break a barricade at the Whitegate refinery in County Cork after a standoff with truckers and farmers demanding cuts in fuel taxes.
DUBLIN — Police pepper-sprayed protesters Saturday as soldiers deployed heavy-lifting equipment to remove trucks and tractors that had been blocking access to Ireland’s only oil refinery.
Irish security forces launched the crackdown outside the Whitegate refinery in County Cork, the country’s primary hub for petrol and diesel, after several hundred fuel stations nationwide ran dry amid panic-buying.
Farmers and hauliers had been blocking tankers from entering or leaving the Whitegate plant since Wednesday in protest against the surging price of motor fuel. They are demanding that the government slash its taxes on fuel, which account for more than 60 percent of the retail price.
Government leaders welcomed news of the security operation in Whitegate, two days after Justice Minister Jim O’Callaghan ordered army assistance for the Garda Síochána, Ireland’s national police force.
“If the Whitegate oil refinery isn’t reopened, this country will shut down. It’s a matter of national security,” said Thomas Byrne, Ireland’s junior minister for European affairs and defense.
Fuels for Ireland, which represents distributors and filling stations, said about 600 of Ireland’s 1,500 gas stations nationwide had already run out of supplies.
Protesters continue to block key roads in central Dublin and several motorway junctions nationwide as part of their demand for immediate tax cuts. The epicenter of the protest is O’Connell Street, Dublin’s central thoroughfare, where scores of parked tractors, trucks and vans have snarled public transport in the capital since Tuesday.
Ireland’s center-right government — which last month cut taxes on petrol and diesel in response to oil price hikes spurred by the U.S.-Israeli attack on Iran — has refused to talk directly to the wildcat protesters because they are acting without support from the official representative bodies, the Irish Road Haulage Association and the Irish Farmers’ Association.
The protesters also are preventing fuel tankers from entering or leaving two of the country’s other key ports for importing oil in Galway and Foynes, in County Limerick. Reflecting that gridlock, a Dutch tanker carrying 6 million liters of fuel has been kept idling in Galway Bay since Thursday because fuel tanks in the port there are already full.
Fuels for Ireland Chief Executive Kevin McPartlan warned that, if tankers continued to be barred from Whitegate, Foynes and Galway, “then I don’t think we could guarantee fuel at any [filling station] forecourt by Monday morning.”
Protesters also are disrupting freight services at Rosslare, Ireland’s main post-Brexit port for shipments with continental Europe. Rosslare officials warned Saturday of a mile-long tailback of trucks and a growing prospect that arriving ships wouldn’t be able to dock and unload cargo.
At Whitegate, police in flak jackets pepper-sprayed and pushed back protesters and pulled one farmer from the cab of his stationary tractor amid angry scenes, but no serious injuries were reported. The protesters were kept behind newly erected steel barriers before a convoy of more than a half-dozen empty tankers arrived under police escort.
When army engineers deployed their heavy-lift trucks against road obstacles, the owners of tractors and trucks handed over the ignition keys voluntarily.
But protest leaders responded to the Whitegate clearance by vowing to double down on obstructions elsewhere. The grassroots movement — organized on Facebook as The People of Ireland Against Fuel Prices — announced plans to organize demonstrations Sunday in towns and cities in all of the country’s 26 counties.