The Aughinish Alumina Review Leaves the Obvious Unanswered

We investigated ourselves and found nothing school of Irish Politics.

The independent review into the exports of the Aughinish Alumina plant in County Limerick, released yesterday, we are assured, has produced no “adverse findings.” Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke has duly passed this document of carefully curated emptiness to the European Commission, as one might hand a particularly bland Christmas present to a distant relative, or a boring relative you rarely see. The Taoiseach himself has confirmed that there exists no definitive proof that alumina from the Aughinish facility is finding its way into the furnaces of Russian weapons manufacturers. There is also, with the exquisite convenience of no definitive proof that it is not either. And so the matter settles, like dust in a room no one intends to clean, into that peculiar bureaucratic twilight where the absence of evidence is treated as a kind of evidence itself, and everyone may go home feeling both reassured and vaguely complicit.

Forgive the raised eyebrow; it is, after all, my only organ …