From the Bog to the Cloud is the bestselling book Ireland needs—a rigorous analysis of the nation’s place in the world and a strategic guide for how to change it through principled, anti-imperialist struggle. Authors Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie dissect an Ireland locked snugly between the competing yet collaborative imperialist interests of the EU, Britain, and the US.
The book’s core analytical framework is drawn from Marx and Lenin, centering on the concepts of dependency, exploitation, and the extraction of value within imperialist structures. It captures the current Irish moment through the lens of the “twin transition”—the simultaneous, state-facilitated processes of digitalisation and decarbonisation, embodied in the proliferation of power-hungry data centres alongside a strategically limited rollout of renewable energy.
Bresnihan and Brodie take the reader on a radical walk through Ireland’s space and time, its infrastructure, economy, and politics. The journey is radical not only in its lucid language but in its refusal to stop before uncovering the root causes of historical development. The dependency theory they employ, naturally linked to a clear anti-imperialist position, provides a consistently productive methodology.
From the outset, writing about Marconi’s wireless transmissions in Connemara as a cornerstone of global telecoms, the authors push back against revisionist histories that paint Ireland’s modernisation as a neutral process of adopting technology and capital. This revisionist narrative, they show, extends from the pre-Free State era straight into the current period of FDI-dependent “development.”
The book masterfully explores the interconnected themes of land, energy, and sovereignty—the perennial questions of the Irish cause. Replacing anecdotal or romanticised accounts of the last century, they provide a materialist history grounded in the actual conditions and class forces at play. To understand the ground on which data centres now metastasize, the authors reveal the legacy of colonial politics and the enduring anchors of empire. In doing so, they deliver one of the best explanations in print of the true function of FDI in the Irish political economy.
While stemming from an interest in data centres—the dominant eco-modernist infrastructure of multinational capital—the book covers a wide range of FDI-driven exploitation, documenting popular resistance and offering an anti-imperialist reading of these struggles. Each chapter is complemented by a textual vignette of a specific place or struggle and powerful photographs by Sean Breithaupt.
Critically, the authors recognise the power of the state to turn this tide—a power that cannot be wielded within the confines of bourgeois ideological capture, and a role that cannot be fulfilled by a state that auctions sovereignty on the imperialist market. In asserting the need to reclaim the state for popular ends, they set a major strategic point for a truly just transition.
Every public conversation about this book draws a full house, as its launches in Dundalk and Dublin have shown. A conversation about From the Bog to the Cloud is a conversation about imperialism, environment, Irish neutrality, and sovereignty—and what traditions of resistance we must build upon. This is not just an academic text; it is a handbook for liberation.
From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland (Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie, Bristol University Press, 2025) is available from Connolly Books, Temple Bar, Dublin.
