Ireland is big tech’s lapdog – and that compromises its EU presidency | Johnny Ryan

On the face of it, Ireland behaves like a good European by being a staunch advocate of human rights and a beacon of progressivism on the western edge of the continent. But there is one vital area in which its record is less than perfect – one that should cause concern when the Irish government takes over the rotating six-month presidency of the EU on 1 July. The EU’s tech and AI rulebook will be renegotiated during the same period, but the Irish state and economy have been captured by big tech. Ireland is so compromised that as president of the Council of the EU, it should recuse itself from all tech and digital sovereignty negotiations.

The last time Ireland held the EU presidency was in 2013, during negotiations on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). A leaked Facebook memo describes a 2013 meeting where the company’s executives met Ireland’s then prime minister to complain about the proposed data privacy rules. They left understanding they had Enda Kenny’s assurance that Ireland would use its “significant influence” as EU Council president to deliver what Facebook called a “positive outcome”. The executives also attended “a dinner hosted by senior Irish politicians to work through the various ways that the Irish could be helpful”.

The 27 EU member states take it in turns to hold the presidency. The presiding country chairs meetings and in effect controls the pace of negotiations on EU legislation. It can prioritise some topics and allow others to slide. For example, Cyprus, a small and vulnerable country in a volatile region, was able to use its presidency from January to June of this year to put mutual defence commitments on Europe’s agenda.

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 for European democracy, competitiveness, security – and particularly for children.

The 2026 film Molly v the Machines tells the story of how social media algorithms pushed suicidal content into the feed of 14-year-old Molly Russell, who took her own life in 2017. There are and will be more Mollys across Europe unless Ireland starts to enforce EU data rules that require “recommender algorithms” to be switched off by default, because they draw upon particularly intimate data.

Ireland may no longer even be keeping up appearances. The country’s newest data protection commissioner, Niamh Sweeney, was previously Meta’ senior lobbyist in Ireland during the Cambridge Analytica scandal and the grim period covered by whistleblower Frances Haugen’s revelations. The Irish government’s process to recruit Sweeney was absurd: the only tech expert on the selection panel was a lawyer for big tech. The selection criteria focused on generic skills such as “managing relationships”, rather than trying to hire an enforcer capable of investigating the world’s most technologically sophisticated companies. No one checked during the hiring process if the appointee was bound by Meta’s notorious practice of barring ex-employees from criticising it, which gagged the former Meta executive and whistleblower Sarah Wynn-Williams so thoroughly. Ireland gives the DPC tens of millions of euros to operate, but lobotomises it.

And the doors keep revolving: the previous data protection commissioner, Helen Dixon, has just started working for Meta’s law firm. The firm continues to act in many live cases for Meta against the DPC. Under Dixon, the DPC sued other European data authorities at the EU’s top court because they had voted that the DPC must investigate Meta’s use of people’s most intimate data. While the case was dismissed, Dixon’s action granted Meta a year’s reprieve from an investigation even starting.

In the book Careless People by Wynn-Williams, she articulates the Meta view of the DPC as a “lapdog”. This eerily mirrors the Irish financial regulator’s hesitancy and deference to Irish banks in the years leading up to the 2008 banking crisis. Earlier this month, Ireland’s foreign minister posted a photo posing with a Meta lobbyist on her LinkedIn profile. “Great to meet with Meta yesterday to discuss priorities for Ireland’s upcoming presidency,” said the caption, along with various talking points from Meta’s 2013 memo that in 2026 appear to have become Irish government policy.

Ireland is even accused of “blocking” class actions from being filed against tech firms on behalf of children by prohibiting commercial funding, even though it permits such funding for commercial arbitration. According to the EU’s Eurobarometer poll this month, 92% of Europeans want the EU to deliver better protection for their children online. Ireland will not deliver such protection unless other EU governments start insisting on it. How much longer will European leaders tolerate Ireland selling out the mental health of their countries’ children?

There was a time when Europe looked like the world’s answer to the worst excesses of big tech. Ireland has sabotaged that dream for a massive payoff. If it will not recuse itself from all tech discussions during its six-month presidency, then Berlin, Paris, Warsaw, Madrid and Brussels should pile the same kind of pressure on Ireland some of them did after the banking crisis. What was unfair then would be entirely fair this time.

Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties

This post was originally published on this site.