Could Ireland survive without importing anything?

Not MRNA-based stuff though :)

We have enough back up systems/parts, engineers, scrap metals and electronic components to keep it going for a long time if it came to it.

The electricity grid would struggle and likely be gone in a matter of days. Gas is required, which wont be available.

Ireland is one of the biggest exporters of pharmaceuticals in the world but we couldn’t make so much as a paracetamol tablet without imported raw materials and equipment

Yes so. Did you bother to read my post on page 1? Gas Networks Ireland will prioritise domestic/residential supply in a crisis. So no gas will go to electricity production. There's a gas quality metric called the Wobbe index and our gas generators can't run on what the Corrib produces alone. It needs to be blended with North Sea gas to have the right quality. All conventional thermal gas generators will swap over to their secondary fuels (oil) till that runs out. Then you are limited by physics with what's left.

Tillage is reliant on fuel for tractors to pull ploughs and harvesters. In the absence of the fuel the alternatives would appear to be either battery power (reliant on electricity generation) or horses.

Our national equine herd is almost exclusively thoroughbred, best of luck to anyone a) finding a thoroughbred strong enough to pull a plough more than 25 meters b) convincing a thoroughbred that it should bother its arse pulling a plough.

Draught horses are now essentially a hobby breed, and I doubt if there are more than a couple of thousand left in the country, we would probably require several hundred thousand to provide the required numbers for transport and ploughing, which would be several decades of breeding up the current herd.

5 million hectares? Best of luck.

Before Ford's first tractor arrived in agriculture a third of arable land was for producing fodder for the farm animals.

I believe the arrival of the tractor did more to break down the ancient arrangements of community work sharing called Meitheal in the 1920s and 1930s. I read an interesting study of that period that estimated that 85% of all services and goods in west coast agrarian areas were conducted without cash.

I'm currently reading a book about Latin correspondence between Ireland and the continent which found records in Florence for the massive import of animal hides and serge fabric from Ireland in the 14th and 15th centuries. A lot of Irish records of what was imported was lost in the Henrician and Cromwellian periods, but I did see a mention once of New Ross being the fifth busiest port in Ireland and Britain in the 13th century (where I read that eludes me, my library is a shambles).

Another report in the book I'm currently reading reports that basic Spanish was understand in many south and west coast communities like Baltimore in the 15th century with many Spanish herring fishers coming this far north. I wonder if that has something to do with the Spanish Arch in Galway? Of course in the Henrician age many Irish nobility sent their sons to the likes of Spain for their education.

It would speed it up but the cross breeds would not be effective crosses until the 4th or 5th generation. The hybrid breed you are talking about already exists in the Irish sports horse, they are 1/2 bred or 3/4 bred Irish Draught and Thoroughbreds. They are our current Show-jumper horses and definitely not strong enough to be plough horses. Even they would require 2 to 4 more generations of breeding with full blood Draughts to be capable of pulling a plough. Even then the Irish draught is among the more athletic of the Draught breeds, they are certainly not as strong as breeds like Cyldesdales or Shires.

I have never ploughed anything with a horse so I don't know. I would imagine so but you also have to realise that each breeding mare is 1 less you can use at the plough (for probably at least 1/3 of the 11 month gestation.

I grew up with horses, but not plough horses (they simply do not exist anymore). My experience is with thoroughbreds not Draughts. All I can definitely say is that no thoroughbred will ever pull a plough effectively. From seeing crossbreds I cannot imagine anything less than 7/8s would have the strength or endurance.

Look at it this way, 1 hectare is 100 meters by 100 meters = 10,000 square meters. If you try plough to 6 inches then each 1 meter side of the square needs 2.5 (?) furrows. 2.5 multiply 100 = 250? A horse must turn 6 inches of wet clingy Irish soil bound together by weeds in rows of 100 meters 250 times (25 kilometers) to make 1 hectare tillable. That is a lot of heavy hard continuous pulling. I cannot imagine it being done in less than 2 to 3 days of 12 hour shifts.

In the scenario all bets would be off. I'd trust a research body more than you unless you are working in that field?

Are you aware the Government has powers in an emergency to take total control of all fuel supplies?

'1971 Act to provide for the overall strengthening of the Minister's powers to respond urgently to a fuel emergency. The amendments allow the Minister, by order, where there is a Government order in place during a severe fuel emergency, to provide for direction-making powers to regulate, restrict or control the acquisition, supply, distribution,
marketing or use of fuels in order to protect the operation of the electricity grid and other essential services.'

From your sources can you quote something that backs your claim that Corrib field gas cannot be used and can't be adapted to use on its own in our gas powered stations?

Ok. Corrib gas may need to be 'scrubbed' before use.

While I do really enjoy this kind of what-iffery, this thread demonstrates how it can rapidly turn into arguments over niche details that (chances are) wouldn't actually be of any relevance, simply because it'd be damn near impossible in today's world to achieve the kind of socio-political and geographical/geological isolation the left the country (any country, even an island) in such a state of self-reliance.

Even if the Russians (picking an example entirely at random … ) were to detonate an EMP that took out all satellite-based communication and navigation, and lobbed several nukes at Western Europe that somehow left Ireland untouched, and sent what's left of their navy to patrol the waters of the Atlantic, and the Campi Flegrei and Yellowstone super-volcanoes erupted at the same time to make sure the world was thrown into utter turmoil, you're still going to have a hell of a lot of people applying all their creative and innovative energies into restoring some kind of "normal".

Now in that scenario, it might well be Mick & Clare doing deals with the SpawnOfPutin and presenting themselves as Heroes of the New Ireland so as to get access to food and fuel, but that's how "civilisation" works and you can be damn sure there'll be plenty of "plain people" quite happy to take the Kremlin's shilling.

Even if you take all the Orwellian politics out of it, it would need a worldwide geo-climatological catastrophe to disrupt all our socio-economic structures, in which case almost all of the discussion above becomes redundant. Making a five-year plan to breed native draught horses won't really be a priority if we're all growing rice instead of potatoes, or chasing camels and scorpions off our burnt-out grasslands.

True enough but even so we could still produce more than we consume. In the Emergency (similar to the scenario) Ireland still exported food, especially beef and dairy. This was at a time when we couldn't get fertilizer or cattlefeed stuffs from the UK as they had prohibited its export to us.

Ah, but where are we going to get the bikes?

The country would be a prime target for invasion and colonisation. Any country cut off completely from imports would be uniquely weak in history. If there is a Farage type government in the UK, they could see it as a chance to reunite the Kingdom.

We still imported grain then, through Irish Shipping Ltd, I imagine a quantity of that went into cattle feed as well as for bread and brewing.

We didn't starve in the war, but we were not well-nourished; there was real food insecurity — that's why we had rationing. We were exporting beef and dairy, not so much because we had surplus food as because we needed something to trade for oil, coal and other necessities that had to be imported.

Plus the population today (5.01 million) is 70% larger than it was in 1946 (2.96 million).

Shur you can't beat a good freshly picked crab apple.

We have more people true but we have much more capacity too. I know the loss of foreign sources of fertilizer etc would impact our production but alternatives could be found and even if our capacity was halved (unlikely) we still would have more than enough to feed our population.