Every month 14 ships leave a quiet port on the west coast of Ireland, carrying alumina towards St Petersburg. Alumina is a fine white powder. Once smelted, it becomes aluminium, a metal essential to modern industry and also to military production, including aircraft, armoured vehicles, missiles and other weapons systems. I began investigating this supply chain after reading a report in The Irish Times earlier this year. I contacted the refinery with questions, but my calls and emails went unanswered.
So I booked a flight home to Ireland and decided to investigate it myself. What I expected to be a short report about a single supply route became one of the largest and most difficult investigations I have ever undertaken. It led me through the ownership of the refinery, its connections to Russia, the environmental damage experienced by people living nearby, the silence surrounding the operation and the political system that allowed it to continue largely unchallenged. I met local people who had been asking questions for years. Farmers who said their lives had been devastated. Workers who were frightened to speak publicly. Independent reporters who had tried to raise the alarm long before the rest of the country began paying attention.
As I started publishing reports from the ground, the story spread further than I could ever have expected. The videos received more than 11 million views across my platforms. Within days, the investigation moved from social media into local, national and international coverage. Ministers were questioned. European officials became involved. A refinery that very few people had heard of suddenly became the centre of a major argument about Ireland, Russia, sanctions and the war in Ukraine. After weeks of filming, research and painstaking editing, this is the full story. It includes the investigation itself, the people we met, the political confrontations, the moments that happened behind the scenes and the extraordinary chain of events that followed once the public began paying attention.