Three weeks ago, James Geoghegan was an unknown agricultural contractor from Westmeath, Ireland. Today, he is a leading figure in a protest movement that has brought Ireland to a standstill – as tractors lined the streets of Dublin and Cork, farmers and hauliers blocked the road to the airport and demonstrations occupied the entrance to petrol depots in Limerick and Galway. It started in a live TikTok chat. “We are all men of agricultural machinery,” Geoghegan told him New statesman. “We’d go for half an hour one or two nights a week, just for a chat between us, something to do really.” He said they would discuss agriculture, the weather and “issues of the day”.
The war in Iran driving up global fuel prices was enough to push the already weary farming community. When one of the men in the TikTok group had a contract canceled – the client could not afford the project’s spiraling costs – alarm bells rang. “We’re all self-employed businessmen, so we think ahead. We all think ahead and look to the future, and we just might see a disaster coming,” he said. The plan was designed to block roads and fuel depots across the country.
“We decided we’d go to Dublin because Dublin is our capital and we’re not too far from it, and then down south the guys down in Cork decided they’d do a couple in Cork and that’s how it started, and then it just took off. Geoghegan said there are currently 40 separate operations going on across Ireland. In Dublin, they’ve caused significant traffic disruption for a week. The Gardaí (Ireland’s police force) have had to divert vehicles from main roads and warn drivers of delays, while the area around Leinster House (Ireland’s parliament) has been cordoned off for the past three days.
The protests have attracted a loose coalition of farmers, transporters, small contractors and other self-employed workers, squeezed by rising fuel costs, as the price of diesel rose from €1.70 a liter to €2.17 and petrol from €1.74 to €1.97 in recent weeks. Geoghegan said the aim of the move is to “educate” the government – run by politicians with no real business experience, he says. “They continue to refuse to listen.” In an attempt to appease the protesters, the government announced a support package: a reduction of 10 cents per liter on both diesel and petrol, and a reduction of 2.4 cents per liter on gas/diesel. The government has also postponed a planned increase in the carbon tax from May until the October budget. The total package costs €505m (£439m). Geoghegan is unimpressed: “The package they brought (on Sunday) won’t help, so as things stand we’re still heading for a depression.” It also seemed to do little to mitigate the issue. After we spoke, Michael Healy-Rae, an independent TD from Kerry, resigned as a junior minister in order to vote with the opposition in a motion of no confidence in the government.
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or POLLS published on Sunday showed that 56 percent of Irish people support the protesters. He said there was “a lot of support” for them. “We were in Dublin city, and the townspeople were all after her. I got a cab home to the house where I was staying, and the cab driver, who is originally from India, has come to Ireland for a living and has his own cab. He brought me home and wouldn’t take any money from me. He said, ‘No, James, you can save us.’
Fuel protests have not occurred in a vacuum and Ireland has been no stranger to public disorder in recent years, with the 2023 Dublin riots the most violent in the city’s modern history. So what else is behind the explosion? Geoghegan rattles off several explanations: the spiraling cost of the National Children’s Hospital, now expected to exceed €2 billion; homelessness and housing crises, with more than 17,000 people in emergency shelter; and increased immigration.
Since 2023, angry anti-immigration protests have erupted sporadically on the streets of Dublin, outside asylum centers and over the border in Belfast. There were a record number of asylum applications in 2024, as well as visible migrant camps along the canal banks in central Dublin. All this tension was exacerbated by the admission of 100,000 Ukrainian refugees from 2022. While these are not explicitly anti-immigration protests, some figures on the Irish far-right have they joined the protests.
Geoghegan’s time in Dublin has been fascinating. “I was in O’Connell Street in Dublin on Thursday night, feeding the homeless with food that people brought us, local people just brought all kinds of sandwiches with restaurants that put out burgers and chips. I just said to myself, isn’t it so sad that I came here as a farmer from the midlands of Ireland and I end up feeding our careless capital when”?
Despite this, there is plenty of frustration over the disruption too – some workers in Dublin describe being stuck in traffic for hours as convoys of tractors move through the capital, while small business owners say numbers are falling. On social media, the discontent is expressed simply: Why punish ordinary workers and not politicians? Geoghegan instead told RTÉ (Ireland’s state broadcaster) that this was “a revolution” that would “change Ireland forever”.
A string of articles have appeared in recent days about Geoghegan, focusing on aspects of his past, including reports of previous convictions for animal welfare offenses and an unresolved tax liability dispute with the Revenue Commissioners. As for the animal welfare allegations, he told me it was “completely out of context”. “There was no real animal cruelty, there was natural loss on the farm.” He added that he had “cleared” the debt money with the Revenue. “This money was never owed,” he added. However, the Irish Times reported that the general collector had secured six debt judgments against him over a period of six and a half years for a total of nearly €550,000.
Organizers say more demonstrations are planned in the coming days, with the possibility of larger and more coordinated actions if demands are not met. He mentions Spain – where the government is introduced the measures to reduce fuel prices by up to 30 cents per liter. There has been recent speculation that the protests could spread to Britain. The Times reported that Tommy Robinson was even planning to ape them. Geoghegan said there had been an interest in their live discussions on TikTok, with a farmer from Wales joining to discuss UK fuel prices. But he added: “What you do there is your business.”
(Further reading: Trump and Mamdani see two different Irelands)
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