Conor Gallagher

So Othinish Illumina is a vast refinery in the Shannon Estuary in County Limerick.

It employs about a thousand people, a little bit more.

And it imports bauxite, raw material from mines in Guinea and Brazil.

And using huge amounts of heat and power and caustic soda transforms that into alumina.

Alumina is the raw material needed to make aluminium.

So they ship that alumina from their dedicated jetty.

to refineries in Europe and, crucially for our point, Russia, where it is shipped by train to huge places in Siberia and turned into finished aluminium.

That's right.

He used to be owned by a Canadian company, then was bought by the Swiss conglomerate Glencore and then was bought by Rusal.

And Rusal is a Russian metals giant, which was founded by the oligarch Oleg Deripaska about 25, 26 years ago.

and Rusal continues to own it.

Rusal is also crucially judged the critical company.

It's not Russian, it's not state-owned, but it's judged the critical national asset by the Kremlin in terms of defence.

Yes, so at least...

Last year and the year before, Europe depended on Agnes for about 30% of its aluminum needs.

And that goes into making almost everything, you know, cans of Coke, cutlery.

Plates, but also crucially, the airlines, or sorry, aircraft, cars, you know, one of their biggest customers is Airbus.

Another one is BMW.

So not only does Russia really depend on it, Europe really depends on it too, which certainly complicates it.

Yeah, Airbus aircraft are used by the Ukrainian forces, who also use, like, Leonardo aircraft and, you know, fighter jets manufactured in Sweden and that sort of thing.