Ireland is Trump’s Trojan horse

Eoin Drea is senior research officer at the Wilfried Martens Centre for European Studies.

For all its trade threats and flips-flops on tariffs, Washington actually has a very consistent policy when it comes to U.S. tech companies — it wants to ensure their global dominance. And it’s got a “friend” in the EU to help with that.

For the White House, the bloc’s recently imposed fines on giants Meta and Apple are a “novel form of economic extortion,” which are designed to escalate transatlantic trade tensions and impose even more “non-trade tariffs” on U.S. companies.

But despite the EU’s intent to redline the defense of its crowning legislative jewel — the Digital Markets Act (DMA) — the more depressing political reality is that the bloc is not united on tech regulation.

The European Commission might earnestly believe its digital rules are a paradigm of virtue, with President Ursula von der Leyen stating: “We don’t care where a company’s from and who’s running it.” But member countries can’t even agree to threaten U.S. tech firms with additional taxes in any possible trade war.

And this time, it’s not Germany or even Hungary’s perennially obstructive Prime Minister Viktor Orbán that’s the problem — it’s Ireland.

For over two decades now, Ireland has been colluding with U.S. tech companies in a pairing deliberately designed to weaken EU tech rules.

It may be a small member country, but Ireland’s dependence on U.S. tech and pharmaceutical companies beggars belief. The country is home to the European headquarters of techies from Meta to Microsoft and everything in between. Meanwhile, Dublin has its very own “Silicon Docks” and direct flights to over 20 U.S. destinations. Such is the scale of travel, Ireland remains the only location in Europe with U.S. immigration and customs preclearance at its airports.

Forget Greenland, Ireland is the North Atlantic island the U.S. already owns. And when it comes to tech, Dublin is Trump’s Trojan horse.

As it stands, about 15 percent of the Irish workforce — that’s about 400,000 people — work directly, or indirectly, for U.S. companies. Nearly 30 percent of Ireland’s total tax revenue in 2023 came from corporate taxes — compared to just 6 percent in Germany and France — which are overwhelmingly sourced from U.S. tech and pharma companies.

As noted by the independent Irish Fiscal Council, without these bumper tax receipts, Ireland would have run a significant budget deficit every year since Dublin last went bankrupt in 2010. (And no, these figures don’t even include the additional €13 billion the European Court of Justice forced Ireland to accept from Apple in a 2024 judgement.)

It’s no wonder then that the Irish prime minister recently appealed for Europe’s response to Washington to be “considered and measured and the action should be proportionate.”

Ireland’s subsequent vow to “resist” EU digital taxes is, in fact, driven by a blind panic arising from its financial dependence on U.S. companies, as well as the reality of its long history of seeking to promote U.S. interests over European ones.

Ireland is stuck in a two-decade-long scandal of its own making: It deliberately collaborated with U.S. tech companies to falsely “build up the credibility” of the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), with the unsuccessful goal of deflecting concern from other EU members as to its impartiality in policing European laws.

It has come to the point where Ireland’s so bad at policing the EU’s data protection regulations that the IDPC is constantly overruled by other national data protection agencies, as well as the Pan-European Data Protection Board.

It’s no wonder these companies describe Ireland as a “lapdog” — or that Brussels has zero faith in Dublin’s professions of Europeanness.

If Brussels is serious about maintaining the integrity of its tech rules, it needs to focus less on Washington and more on shifting regulation away from Dublin.

It’s clear that Ireland will never become a credible regulator of U.S. tech companies in Europe — its political proximity to Silicon Valley and its economic dependency render this impossible. In fact, Ireland’s reliance on the U.S. makes it ideal for a White House intent on weaponizing tech and social media companies as part of wider trade and cultural battles.

Rather, the EU needs a centralized agency to police all European tech laws, including the DMA and the General Data Protection Regulation. It needs a body to regulate large tech companies operating in the EU on a Pan-European level, an EU institution that removes national bias from decisions of European importance.

Such a move would liberate Dublin from the opposing pressures of Brussels and Washington, as well as ensure no other EU member country could potentially replicate its light-touch regulatory regime. 

Even any future moves Trump might make to undermine Ireland’s attractiveness to U.S. multinationals should be welcomed in Dublin, as it would result in a lower yet more sustainable growth path for the Emerald Isle, which finds itself beset by a housing shortage, creaking public services and inadequate physical infrastructure. It would also — without a doubt — increase its credibility on the EU stage.

But make no mistake — the vast majority of existing U.S. investment in Ireland isn’t going anywhere soon. As the de facto 51st state, Ireland is embedded in U.S. supply chains in a way that extends well beyond individual presidents and ideologies.

And luckily for Europe, there’s an existing model it can follow. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the supervision of over 100 of the largest banks operating within the EU was moved from national regulators to the European Central Bank. The result? Notwithstanding Brexit, the pandemic, the war in Ukraine and Trump 2.0, Europe’s financial sector is now stable, profitable and viewed by global investors as a safe haven.

Now, it’s time to apply that model to tech. It’s time for Ireland to pick a side. And it’s time for Brussels to force them.