Today the mediators in Islamabad say the United States and Iran have agreed the final text of a deal to end the war that began in late February. Trump says it will be signed shortly. Israel, which launched the war alongside the US, is not a party to it. So the relief is real and the relief is provisional. Either way oil will come off its highs and the pumps will refill. That moment, the exhale, is the most dangerous one for a country like this, because it is exactly when the lesson of the last three months gets quietly filed away.

The shock was not a forecast. It arrived in April. Diesel rose about 28% and petrol about 25% in the weeks after the war started, petrol reaching €1.91 a litre and diesel €2.14 against €1.70 and €1.69 in January. By 10 April roughly 600 of the country's 1,500 filling stations had run dry. The M50 and both sides of O'Connell Street were blockaded, the State signed off two emergency packages worth three-quarters of a billion euro and the government survived a confidence vote 92 to 78. Home heating oil was up 63.3% on the year by March. This is not a scenario. It happened, two months ago and it is sitting in the official statistics.

It is tempting to read that as Ireland being cut off. It was not. The tankers kept coming. Dublin Port took 101 oil tankers in the ninety days after the war began, up from 94 in the comparable period. Whitegate, the country's one refinery, took 54 against 56 a year earlier. Ireland does not draw oil directly through the Strait of Hormuz at all: 93% of the tankers arriving here had last docked elsewhere in Europe, 65 of them from the United Kingdom and 45 from the Netherlands. The crude never stopped. What failed in April was not supply. It was distribution and nerve. The forecourts ran dry because people topped up tanks they did not need and because the protesters blocking the roads were themselves choking the tankers. The shortage was made at home.

That is the more uncomfortable finding, because it is structural and it does not leave when the war does. Ireland imports 79.5% of its energy, the fourth-highest dependency in the European Union. Fossil fuels meet 81% of demand and oil alone is 60% of that. The country refines almost none of what it burns: Whitegate is small and everything past it arrives as finished product, most of it through Britain. There is no domestic cushion on price. Ireland is a price-taker and in April the price was set in a war it had no part in.

The electricity bill offers no shelter either and here the line back to the same war is direct rather than coincidental. Over 40% of Irish electricity is generated from gas and under the market's design the last and most expensive unit needed sets the price paid to every generator. That unit is almost always gas, which is why a grid that is now roughly a third wind still prices off fossil fuel. The gas arrives through a single route, the interconnectors from Scotland, the Corrib field is in decline and Kinsale storage is closed. Gas is also tied to the same chokepoint as the oil: about a fifth of the world's LNG passes through the Strait of Hormuz, almost all of it Qatari and that output was disrupted during this crisis. Every escape route from the oil shock, the heat pump, the electric car, lands the household back on a gas-set grid exposed to the same valve.

Against all this the State holds a strategic reserve, ninety days of supply, the figure every member of the International Energy Agency must keep. The reassurance is thinner than the number. More than a third of the public reserve sits on Whiddy Island off Cork; the rest is spread across domestic sites and storage in Spain, Sweden, Denmark and the Netherlands, held abroad partly because foreign tanks are cheaper than building our own. How much sits inside the country versus abroad and how much is oil we own versus contracts giving us only an option to buy in an emergency, the State does not disclose. The law is better than instinct suggests: EU rules bar a host country from obstructing reserves held on its soil for another member. Yet that guarantee has never been tested against a host government facing its own queues. Legal availability is not the same as a tanker physically leaving a foreign port in a crisis. A coordinated release through the IEA requires the agreement of every member at the table. The buffer is real, legally defended and untested in precisely the systemic case it exists for. As of this week it is being drawn, ten days of supply released under an IEA action, with an estimate of twelve months to refill.

None of this happened to a calm country. The same April that emptied the forecourts saw the protests turn confrontational, a self-appointed leadership telling crowds there was "not a f***ing oil truck moving in this country" while the Taoiseach warned that no self-appointed group would close the State down. Those protests began as a genuine revolt over the cost of fuel, organised by farmers and hauliers. The far right moved quickly to capture them, hosting the spokesmen, busing in councillors, amplified from abroad by the usual names. The organisers pushed much of it back out, removing people who steered the thing toward immigration. The capture was attempted and resisted and not perfectly clean. That ambiguity is the honest picture.

Two months later the North was burning, over something else entirely. In June 2025 it was Ballymena, this week it was Belfast, both anti-migrant, both vicious. Rioters went door to door looking for immigrants, chanting "foreigners out". Twenty-seven people were burned out of their homes: Ugandan carers, a Ukrainian family, a Romani family. The police called it what it was, racially motivated. It is worth being precise about whose violence this is, because it will be misremembered. The mobs were drawn from loyalist communities, and the migrant families who flew Union Jacks and wrote "British household" in their windows to be spared were flying the flag of the people attacking them. This is not anti-colonial memory dressed up. It is a pogrom. Naming it wrongly only helps the people who set the fires.

The fuel protests and the riots do not share a cause. It would be dishonest to wire them together. What they share is a base. A society with margin absorbs shocks one at a time. A brittle one meets them all at once. The months either side of this ceasefire have delivered an energy shock, a cost-of-living shock and an immigration-anxiety shock onto the same strained ground. On what actually drives the last of those the evidence is clear and it is not the comfortable story. The ESRI found that hostility to immigration tracks economic disadvantage and the pace of demographic change, not the presence of migrants as such and not, on their data, competition for local services. Where people live alongside more migrants their attitudes are warmer, not colder. The friction is a function of precarity and speed, not diversity. That distinction is the whole difference between understanding this and feeding it.

So the question the ceasefire invites, whether the danger has passed, is the wrong one. The danger was never this particular war. It was that an island which imports four-fifths of its energy, refines almost none of it, prices its electricity off a single gas route and holds an unknown share of its emergency reserve in other countries' tanks is exposed to any shock of this shape. And shocks of this shape recur. The forecourts will refill, the price will ease, the tractors are back in the fields and clogging only our lesser roads. If the pattern holds, none of the things that made a fortnight in April so sharp will be touched, because the political will to touch them evaporates the moment the pressure does.

That is the trap. The calm arriving this week is not proof the system is sound. It is the same calm the system manufactured all spring, the flat prices that let everyone carry on as though nothing had changed, right up until they couldn't. A country learns nothing from a near miss it is relieved to forget. The useful thing Ireland could take from the last three months is small and unglamorous and entirely within its own gift: storage it controls, a grid that does not live or die on one pipe, a reserve it can actually reach and an honest account of why a frightened public turned on its most vulnerable people rather than on the structure that left them all exposed. None of that gets built in the exhale. It only gets built while the lesson is still fresh, which is now, briefly, before the relief does its work.

Sources