Halliburton, KBR and their role in the building of Ireland's infrastructure

The scheme of public-private partnerships (PPPs) through which the National Roads Authority is implementing the Government's road-building mania involves an aspect which has been ignored even by those who oppose it on various grounds and in various degrees, namely that of furthering Anglo-American strategic imperatives. The Government, having manifested its loyalty to the new world order, its enforcement of tax breaks to foreign multinationals, its political and financial support of the invasion of Iraq, and its continuation of Free State policies in its refusal to initiate a public enquiry into the Dublin-Monaghan bombings being just three examples, is not likely to stop short and insist on an infrastructure which is of actual benefit to the population.

The strategic implications of Irish transport policy are well supported by the available evidence. The NRA has insisted on the construction of autobahn-like motorways at vast public expense to facilitate the reliance on private forms of transport, despite the total absence of a spatial strategy. Urban development, in so far as there is any, is entirely random, an afterthought to the main imperative of road building, which possesses policy makers like a fixation, and following after it regardless of planning precedent. The result has been the displacement of populations, as economic life shifts away from localities and becomes centralized as a natural consequence of centralized development. But what accompanies this is the increasing dependence of people on the whims of government, just at the time they have affirmed their loyalty to the renewed Anglo-American scheme of world hegemony.

It is, of course, possible that the true aim of the road-building programme is to create markets for the automobile and oil industries, but it would be more difficult to sell a policy that honestly stated its aim as being to prop up struggling corporations who, having preached the virtues of "competition" while enjoying large government subsidies, are beginning to glimpse the vacuum of which the "free" "market" consists. Instead, the aim is said to be the reduction of journey times, the reduction of traffic congestion in population centres, the facilitation of Business.

What is lacking here is any consideration that the purpose of a journey is to go from one place to another. If the destination is already in the grip of traffic congestion, building roads might of course increase the space available for traffic to enjoy, but will not lessen this congestion; it will encourage it. The disproportionate investment in private at the expense of public transport makes this a certainty. But the evidence that no benefits are accruing from turning the country into one large motorway does not deter the NRA or the associated Ministries; when the New Jerusalem comes, when the day arrives on which the last Great Motorway is delivered, everyone will zoom about from one destination to another in his or her little car without experiencing delay or automotive carnage of any kind.

But what is not mentioned are the geopolitical reasons for concentrating the bulk of the population in huge conurbations, and making it impossible to travel without using privately-owned toll roads. Local communities and independent local economies are being eliminated by "development", which consists largely of incursions by huge commercial stores peddling cheaply-manufactured products, inferior in every respect to the locally manufactured products they are "competing" against, but also impossible to dislodge. The brand-name is a political phenomenon, encouraging compliance by selling an image which has little or no basis in reality, but the possession of which imparts a portion of that magic, a distant image of that image that one might reach if one buys hard enough. The power which one purchases by purchasing the name is vacuous, imaginary, but the psychological satisfaction it imparts immense, because whether aware of it or not the card-carrying consumer is always being monitored and monitoring others, and the resultant pacification akin to a state of sanctity, of all being well with one and the world.

If it is impossible to get anywhere except by using motorways, it is a simple matter to monitor the travel habits of undesirable and restless elements. But it is also easy to destroy large sectors of the population in bombing raids, when there are hundreds of thousands concentrated in the space of a few square miles, particularly when Ireland is comparatively low in density of population, an objective that has been achieved through the use of emigration as a means of social control. Population movement in wartime can be prevented simply by destroying the road network, or setting up checkpoints. (In this context, it is interesting that advertisements are now appearing on Irish television warning the public against breeding to excess.) In the case of invasion rather than outright destruction, large numbers of troops could be deployed from the focal point in Dublin to any area of the country in a matter of hours.

These possibilities are not as far-fetched as they sound; in fact, in the light of the apparent intention of the Government to bankrupt the country by pouring limitless money into roads and leaving the NRA to get on with building them regardless of all other considerations, the likelihood of such a conclusion increases. Never again will the masters of the world risk fighting a guerilla campaign in the hills of Munster against recalcitrant Irish. To this end, Kellogg, Brown and Root (KBR), a subsidiary of the Halliburton corporation, has been granted contracts by the NRA for the Dublin Port Tunnel, of which it has been said that it will do nothing to alleviate Dublin's traffic congestion, and of which complaints have been made regarding substandard and unsafe construction standards; and the Rathcormac/Fermoy (N8) Bypass, which will involve constructing a suspension bridge over the ecologically sensitive Blackwater Valley. KBR is also the senior party of a consortium competing to build the M3 motorway, part of which goes through the Tara-Skryne Valley. But no mistake should be made: KBR is a military contractor. Among its achievements are the construction of housing for 100,000 soldiers in Iraq and the Guantanamo Bay detention/torture centre in Cuba.

Of course, Irish politicians are very grateful to America for the World Bank and globalization’s gift to humanity, and seek to pay back this gratitude by inflicting a low tax, low wage regime on the country to keep struggling US corporations from going under in the competitive business environment. But their love of US foreign policy seems just as compelling, which is why Shannon airport has been turned into a conduit for American personnel on their way to the bombing of Iraq, and transporting kidnap victims to Guantanamo. The connection between business and war is of course entirely coincidental and benign, and the Irish Government can claim that the use of Shannon by the US military is exclusively a financial issue. But the Government can also involve itself in the occupation of Iraq when it wishes, as Brian Cowen did in calling for invasion when Ireland was a member of the UN Security Council, and as both the new Foreign Minister Mr. Dermot Ahern and the Taoiseach, brother Bertie, have done when British citizens were kidnapped in Iraq, even though they see no contradiction between this and their disregard of the illegal detention of Irish citizens in Columbia and Israel.

The NRA consistently overlooks Irish companies in the awarding of road contracts in favour of members of the "Coalition Of The Willing" such as Spain and Turkey. But the fact that concerns such as KBR are involved in projects whose folly is on a par with that of China's dam projects indicates that war is being waged in Ireland, by proxy, by other means, but unequivocally war. Just as Irish culture and history are being twisted to suit to demoralize the Irish people and imbue them with a colonial mindset, the country is in the process of having a physical template imposed on it to facilitate a physical conquest.

© The Tara Foundation 2004