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.