A group of leading university professors have urged the Irish EU presidency to sit out of negotiations on EU tax and digital laws, pointing to “insurmountable conflicts of interest”.
Benjamin Fox
The Irish EU presidency should recuse itself from any legislative files on tax because of its “questionable track record regarding the protection of EU digital rights and the EU’s fiscal base,” a group of 60 leading academics urged on Wednesday (8 July).
In a letter seen by EUobserver, the group of senior university professors and lecturers pointed to the cosy relationship between successive Irish governments and Big Tech and other corporate giants.
Last October, Niamh Sweeney, a former lobbyist for Meta, joined the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) as commissioner, making her one of Europe’s most powerful data watchdogs.
Ireland’s 12.5 percent corporate tax rate is one of the lowest across the bloc and has been designed to attract Big Tech firms and others wishing to minimise their tax burden. That has seen tech giants including Google, Meta, Apple, Microsoft, OpenAI, TikTok, and X make Ireland their EU domicile for tax.
That, in turn, makes Ireland’s data protection commission a gatekeeper for the rest of the EU.
For their part, Amazon and Chinese fast-fashion giant Temu are also based in Ireland for tax purposes.
In 2024, the European Court of Justice ruled that Apple must pay €13bn in tax after deeming that its sweetheart deal with the Irish government was illegal. The ruling, which concluded a decade-long legal battle, described Dublin’s tax deal with Apple as “unlawful aid”.
The EU Commission had set the €13bn bill back in 2016, much to the chagrin of the Irish government, which repeatedly appealed against it.
“Ireland’s reliance upon giant non-EU firms creates insurmountable conflicts of interest, as evidenced by the country’s track record in the area of data regulation and taxation,” said the letter.
The so-called Tax Omnibus, proposed by the EU Commission in February, is one of the files likely to dominate the Irish presidency’s agenda. So, too, is the Digital Omnibus. Both have been packaged by the European Commission as efforts to reduce the bureaucratic burden facing businesses across the bloc.
The letter added that Lithuania, which is due to take over the EU presidency in January, should be responsible for leading negotiations on tax and digital files.
During a plenary debate in Strasbourg earlier this week, Irish prime minister Micheál Martin said: “Every member state has a significant number of technology companies … Ireland will be an honest broker in dealing with all of these issues.”
“The Irish presidency is carrying out its responsibilities with complete impartiality … Our role is to facilitate agreement among all member states and to advance the Council’s legislative agenda. Throughout our presidency, we remain focused on delivering the ambitions of the ‘One Europe, One Market’ roadmap, including its digital priorities,” said a spokesperson for the Irish presidency.
Signatories of the open letter include leading academics such as Shoshana Zuboff (Harvard University), Mariana Mazzucato (University College London), Isabella Weber (University of Massachusetts Amherst), Jason Hickel (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Abeba Birhane (Trinity College Dublin) and Alberto Alemmano (HEC Paris and EUobserver columnist).
