Huawei row, O’Halloran detention threaten China’s relationship with Ireland

Like many small nations reliant on trade with China, Ireland has long been careful not to rock the boat on issues deemed sensitive to Beijing.

But a row over Huawei, a businessman’s ongoing lengthy detention in Shanghai, and a rising backlash against China’s human rights records may force Ireland’s hand.

Four elected officials this week joined a pan-national, bipartisan group pushing hardline legislation on China, and warned that a confluence of issues, both domestic and international, are changing Irish perceptions on China.

Even as Ireland’s leadership continues to push for more trade with the world’s second largest economy, the group warns that things are “at a tipping point”.

“China is a big trading partner for us, particularly in respect of agricultural exports. The Chinese love our milk, our dairy products have found a huge market there, but that’s not reason enough to bend over for them,” said Barry Ward, a Fine Gael Senator from Dún Laoghaire, a coastal town south of Dublin, and co-chair of the Inter-parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) in Ireland.

Ireland is in a bind familiar to many Western nations, where concerns over an authoritarian shift in China are being weighed against the desire to access a 1.4 billion person market.

Ireland is one of the few countries with a trade surplus over China, selling €4.36 billion (US$5.2 billion) more goods than it bought last year. Exports to and imports from China both rose by more than 18 per cent during 2020, data from Ireland’s statistics board show.

But now, two issues have soured the public mood.

Most prominent is the case of Richard O’Halloran, who has been held in China since February 2019 without charge, after travelling to Shanghai to attempt to resolve a dispute between the government and his employer, China International Aviation Leasing Service.

The company is accused of defrauding Chinese investors as part of a peer-to-peer lending scheme, a sector Chinese authorities have cracked down on forcefully in recent years. No charges have been filed against O’Halloran, who is not in prison, but is also not allowed to fly back to his family in Ireland.

The Irish government is negotiating his return.

“I think it is probably fair to use the phrase ‘tipping point’ in Ireland. A lot of it is around awareness,” said Malcolm Byrne, a Fianna Fáil Senator from Wexford who also signed up to the IPAC, and who said he supports calls for next year’s Winter Olympics to be moved from Beijing.

Byrne said that a recent incident involving Huawei, the O’Halloran case and human rights concerns helped him make up his mind to join the alliance.

The Chinese tech giant has been accused of trying to silence academics by writing to the Irish Defence Minister to complain about an article published in a state-owned defence journal. The article said that Huawei’s inclusion in Ireland’s 5G network “creates both foreseeable and unforeseeable risks to network and data security”.

Tony Yangxu, the Huawei Ireland chief executive, requested the government’s “full support in mitigating the damage that has been done”, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Irish Times.

Academic Richard Maher, who wrote the report, said he was surprised by the approach of Huawei, which has successfully grown in Ireland and whose equipment is being used by Eir – one of Ireland’s three major mobile network providers – in its 5G mobile networks.

“This was entirely new to me even though I have written about Europe-China relations in the past, but I’ve never seen nothing like this reaction before,” said Maher, a lecturer in politics at University College Dublin (UCD).

“People don’t pay much attention to this publication, but I think because of their reaction now a lot more people are familiar with it,” Maher said.

Neale Richmond, a Dublin-based member of the Irish parliament, who said he was mulling over joining the IPAC group, said Huawei had mounted “a direct assault on academia in Ireland and it’s very, very concerning”.

Huawei has denied this.