Denis Staunton

speaker

115 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 15 Jul

Denis Staunton’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Inside Business with Ciaran Hancock · Will the State’s plan for the Carlton Cinema site revitalise O’Connell Street? · 15 Jul 2026 podcast

Now, clearly what they said to him was not just that this was going to be a huge burden in terms of costs, because like this 20 percent would be something like an average of 32 million dollars per ship, as opposed to, say, one or two million, which the Iranians were threatening.

But also it broke the whole principle of this war.

In a sense, part of what it was about was the idea of freedom of navigation.

And the international rules governing navigation is that if it's a natural waterway, then all ships should be able to go through.

They shouldn't have to pay to go through.

Whereas if it's a man-made waterway, like, say, the Suez Canal or the Panama Canal, that's OK.

You can charge for that.

And so the danger would be that if you actually allow people to charge to go through, say, the Strait of Hormuz, that then in the Strait of Malacca,

for example, which is over between Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia, which is another big choke point for energy going through to Asia, that suddenly they might decide to start charging as well.

And so this is the reason why the principle is so important.

But the danger for the United States and its allies is that he has almost given up the principle now.

And so immediately when he made that threat, the Iranians tweeted out saying, you're absolutely right.

If you're providing protection and facilitation for these, then you should be able to charge.

Well, not that much.

The Saudis have tried to divert some, and there are some overland routes, but they're really not sufficient.

So Dubai is now talking about building another port.

And so it's really quite difficult to avoid it.

And so what you saw was that, say, when the ceasefire came into effect,

the number of ships going through started to get up to, say, 30% or 50% of the pre-war level.

But then in the last few days, once they started shooting at each other, that then dwindled to a kind of a trickle, and now it's more or less stopped.

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