"Lured by tax breaks and a culture of gentle persiflage, giants such as Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok and X all established their European headquarters in Ireland. The EU’s “country of origin” principle determines that the country that hosts a company’s European HQ is the country responsible for regulating it across the EU. This legal quirk has turned the Irish data protectioncommission (DPC) into Europe’s primary watchdog for the tech sector: Ireland pushed to make this happen as council president in 2013.

The effects of this arrangement are staggering. The DPC’s chairperson recently admitted that apart from “amicable resolutions” on trivial issues, Ireland has not completed a single EU inquiry into Google or any of its subsidiaries in the 10 years since the GDPR was enacted. EU-wide protections are paralysed because every other member state must wait for Ireland to act in an EU-wide response.

When the DPC has enforced against big tech firms, it has done so poorly and under duress from other European regulators. It did move with uncharacteristic speed in one instance, against Elon Musk’s Grok AI, but then accepted a settlement that appears to have collapsed. Ireland’s media regulator, Coimisiún na Mean, enjoys a better reputation but has far weaker powers. For a decade now, Ireland has held open the regulatory back door that allows giant US and Chinese companies to operate with impunity across Europe. It has become not only a tax haven, but a haven from regulation.

The economic dependency is stark. Three US firms accounted for almost half of Ireland’s corporate tax revenue in 2024. In 2022, Ireland collected almost five times more corporate tax per person than France or Germany. You may admire a once small, poor and un-industrialised country for having won the race to the bottom and becoming rich. But the consequences have been grim..."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

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