What US Tech Did to Ireland

The country is alarmingly reliant on Meta, Google and Apple.

NOVEMBER 11, 2025

In 2001, when I was 16 years old, the city around me was changing visibly. From the tiny attic of my dad’s redbrick terraced house on the edge of the inner city, I could glimpse the cranes at work, converting Croke Park, the historic stadium in which the Gaelic Athletic Association plays their finals, into an 80,000-seater, the fourth-largest stadium in Europe. The scaffolding towered above the surrounding warren of one- and two-story Victorian cottages, an incongruous steel pile. For a high school art project, our teacher had given us all old film cameras and instructed us to take pictures of our environment. I was staying with my dad, and after taking photos of the half-finished stadium, its steel buttresses jabbing into the air, I asked him to drive me around to a few other places of architectural interest. Like any father of a teenage daughter, he welcomed this vanishingly rare opportunity to share some of this life with me, so he took me on a drive around his place of work — Dublin Port, where he had begun his working life as a clerk at the age of 18 in 1970. The port area, by the early 2000s, was undergoing huge changes. Swathes of land historically belonging to the port had been taken over by the newly created Dublin Docklands Development Authority (DDDA), and vast identikit apartment and office buildings were rising from the ashes of the docklands.

The vision for the area was a new quarter of shining office blocks to attract direct foreign investments from the tech and financial sectors. By the time I’d finished secondary school in 2003, the tech companies — eager to situate their European headquarters in an English-speaking country with beneficial tax rates and an educated work force — had started to arrive.

Our first stop was the redeveloped area beside the Harbourmaster pub, a whimsical London-brick building sitting squat behind the old bonded warehouse at George’s Dock. This was where the coal boats used to deliver their loads, and a favored haunt of my dad and other Dublin Port staff. He remembers children diving into the dock to retrieve what coal would fall off the boats. When we visited, all that was left of this version of the docks was the vinegar stink of the stagnant water below glinting office blocks. My dad was amazed by what had been built here, but to me, young romantic, the area felt sterile — I preferred the area’s Georgian warehouses, tall-spired churches, and warrens of small redbrick houses, which were in the process of being built over. I didn’t take many pictures, so my dad took me farther out into the working port, where I snapped poorly focused pictures of the ladders on water towers and piles of containers. My teacher gave me a B.

The aim of the DDDA was to regenerate an area that stretched from the Customs House in the west to Dublin Port in the east — a mixture of council flats, disused warehouses, and small Victorian terraces. It had the authority to grant planning permissions and would oversee the investment of €7 billion of private and public funds in the docklands. The vision for the area was a new quarter of shining office blocks to attract direct foreign investments from the tech and financial sectors. By the time I’d finished secondary school in 2003, the tech companies — eager to situate their European headquarters in an English-speaking country with beneficial tax rates and an educated work force — had started to arrive. In 2003 Google set up its campus on Barrow Street, on the south side of the river, an unusual move at the time for a tech company, many of which in Ireland (including Hewlitt Packard and Microsoft) had traditionally preferred greenfield sites or business parks. Facebook (now Meta) opened its European headquarters in Dublin in 2008, joining other tech giants, such as Amazon, eBay, and PayPal. Twitter (now X) arrived in 2011. Google later solidified its supremacy in the docklands by buying the redeveloped site of Boland’s Flour Mills, some 1.7 acres between Barrow Street and Grand Canal Dock, for €170 million. The site was one of the key locations of Ireland’s Easter Rising in 1916 — an armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland that would pave the way for Irish independence. It now includes 46 apartments and 300,000 square feet of office space for some 2,000 tech workers.

The area I had visited with my dad soon became known as Silicon Docks. Droves of tech workers vied for Dublin’s limited housing stock in these rapidly gentrifying areas, pushing locals out of traditionally working-class areas like the North Wall, where a small terrace of 10 Victorian houses has been dwarfed by the development of a 25-story skyscraper. Today, the residents, some of whom have lived there for generations, feel their needs have been ignored. As one resident, Tony McDonnell, puts it, “We were told, ‘We can’t allow a group of houses to prevent the economic recovery of this city.’” The plight of the people of North Wall feels like a microcosm of the problem posed by these tech companies for the people of Ireland: While their contribution to our GDP has been huge and successive governments have scrambled to make Ireland attractive to them, their benefits to individual citizens can be intangible at best, and at worst, detrimental.

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The main draw for these tech companies, of course, was Ireland’s historically low corporate tax rate, which allows them access to the lucrative EU market without having to pay its higher tax rates. From 1981 to 2003, taxes on trading manufacturing profits (this came to include financial services and activities in the International Financial Services Centre and Shannon Airport) for companies exporting goods was 10 percent, in comparison with the average EU corporate tax rate of 32 percent. This was replaced with a 12.5 percent general tax in 2003. There were other benefits. The notorious “double Irish” tax loophole allowed U.S. companies to avoid taxation on royalty payments if they resituated their intellectual property to an Irish-registered company controlled by a tax haven, such as Bermuda. The loophole was abolished for new companies in 2015 and only phased out for existing companies in 2020.

I recently rewatched an RTÉ news segment about Facebook’s choice to locate its European headquarters in Ireland. At the time, the social media platform had 100 million users worldwide and about 300,000 in Ireland; it was still necessary to explain to the TV audience what Facebook was. The company was bringing just 70 jobs to the Irish economy, and yet its arrival was newsworthy.

Ireland’s unique tax policy can be traced back to civil servant T.K. Whitaker, who introduced an innovative economic development plan in 1958, some 15 years before Ireland joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU. His plan moved the country away from protectionist economic policies and paved the way for foreign direct investment — a form of cross-border investment where an investor from one country has ownership stake in a company in another country. Companies like IBM and Ericsson soon started opening subsidiaries in Ireland, followed by companies like Dell in the 1970s and 1980s. Apple’s history in Ireland began in 1980 in Cork, where it was lured by a 10-year “tax holiday” offered by the Industrial Development Authority (IDA) between 1965 and 1980.

When Facebook arrived in 2008, the Irish economy had been dealt a disastrous blow by the 2008 global financial crash. In 2010, Ireland would require a bailout of €67.5 billion from the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, and the European Commission—an amount then equal to 40 percent of Ireland’s economy. I recently rewatched an RTÉ news segment about Facebook’s choice to locate its European headquarters in Ireland. At the time, the social media platform had 100 million users worldwide and about 300,000 in Ireland; it was still necessary to explain to the TV audience what Facebook was. The company was bringing just 70 jobs to the Irish economy, and yet its arrival was newsworthy. The RTÉ report included a clip of a speech by Tánaiste (deputy prime minister) and Minister for Enterprise Mary Coughlan about the benefits of Facebook. These were some of the darkest days of the recession. I remember completing the purchase of my first house amid huge fear that there would be a run on the banks. It seems quaint now, but during those first days in our new home, my partner and I spent each day repainting the rooms with the radio on, listening for the news that the country might fall deeper into the pit of financial ruin. Would I lose my job and have to post my keys back through the letter box and declare bankruptcy, like some friends of mine were having to do? Watching the news report again, I can see that the minister looks tired. Her voice is thin. I may be projecting, but she looks like someone clutching a life ring in a stormy sea.

By 2016, the number of Facebook staff numbers in Ireland had ballooned to 1,500. The company leased two Daniel Liebeskind-designed buildings on Grand Canal Square, a 10-minute walk away from Google’s Barrow Street campus. Justin Comiskey, who profiled the building in The Irish Times for the Open House Architecture tours of Dublin in 2016, captured the optimism of the era: “Corporate cool meets industrial garage meets funky furniture meets high-tech meets street art.”

In the months after the graveyard quiet of my visit, Facebook Ireland became the focus of a huge international investigation into illegal data transfers between Europe and the United States. By 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that Facebook was “engaged in criminal and unlawful surveillance throughout Europe, for which compensation is payable.”

I paid a visit to Facebook HQ in my role as a poet that same year. I had been asked by Poetry Ireland to come and give a reading to staff members during their lunch break. It was a short walk along the quays from the Abbey Theatre, where I worked at the time. At the entrance, a sullen security guard asked for my ID. I didn’t have any to hand. After a long back and forth, the head of Poetry Ireland came and rescued me and the two other poets — one from Cork and one from Belfast — who had also been invited. We moved through a vast and silent foyer, past the backs of employees working in booths, to a large conference room, where we were welcomed by two friendly but slightly harried human resources staff members. No one had showed up for the reading. The staff members were apologetic, and one went out to see if she could round up some attendees. She came back 10 minutes later, embarrassed: “Everyone tends to work through lunch here.” And so we three poets read to one another, the two HR staff members, the head of Poetry Ireland, and the organization’s PR person, who decided (diplomatically) to take some very closeup photos of the poets, so the lack of audience would not be visible. After our reading, the other poets and I emerged into the spring sunshine with a few jokes about never speaking of this reading again — a promise I kept, until now.

In the months after the graveyard quiet of my visit, Facebook Ireland became the focus of a huge international investigation into illegal data transfers between Europe and the United States. By 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that Facebook was “engaged in criminal and unlawful surveillance throughout Europe, for which compensation is payable.” The EU ordered Facebook to pay a record €1.2 billion in fines.

Facebook (now Meta) faces other fines as well. Another case relating to breaches of security brought in 2019 led the Irish data protection commissioner to impose a fine of €91 million on the company.  In 2023, a new case was taken against both Meta and Apple for noncompliance with the EU’s Digital Markets Act, which obliges companies to give users the choice of services that use less of their personal data. Meta has been ordered by the ECJ to pay €200 million in fines, with Apple liable for €500 million. These numbers may seem vast, but as The Guardian reported in April 2025, they are far below the potential maximum fines. “In effect, the EU knocked 46 hours off of Apple’s year of profit, and shortened Meta’s year by 28 hours.” Although the total fines levied against Meta by the Irish data protection commissioner come to the region of €3.3 billion, as of January 2025 only €20 million of those fines had been collected. Meta is continuing to challenge the rulings in court.

Tech companies have become such a central part of the Irish economy that we’re now alarmingly reliant on the income they bring, even if the benefits are rarely felt by the average citizen.

The Irish data commissioner had been reluctant to pursue fines due from Meta, and the Irish government has shown a similar reticence with the Apple Windfall Tax: a sum of €13 billion in unpaid corporate tax that the ECJ first ruled in 2016 was due to Ireland. The European Commission found that Apple had used a variation of the “double Irish” tax system to shield $110 billion in non-U.S. profits from taxation between 2004 and 2014. The Irish government has challenged the EU’s findings several times, and the final ruling on the case came in 2024, after the Irish government lost its final challenge in defense of Apple at the ECJ. In 2019, as legal challenges were ongoing, I was working as deputy museum director for the Irish Emigration Museum. I gave a tour to Margrethe Vestager, then European commissioner for competition, who was visiting Dublin for government talks around preparations for Brexit. During a break in her busy schedule of government meetings, I had an hour to show her around the museum. I congratulated her on the work that she and the European Commission had done in finding that the Irish government had granted unlawful state aid to Apple. She looked at me wryly. “You’re happy about it? That makes you the one person I’ve spoken to today who is.” The tax windfall seemed like a boon to the average Irish citizen still recovering from the hardships of the recession, and the government’s initial unwillingness to take it was a cause of confusion and resentment. It was clear that Vestager shared this frustration.

Tech companies have become such a central part of the Irish economy that we’re now alarmingly reliant on the income they bring, even if the benefits are rarely felt by the average citizen. Since the mid-2010s, the relocation of intellectual property assets by companies like Apple to Ireland has grossly distorted its GDP — to the extent that Ireland is often left out of EU GDP calculations to avoid skewing the data. This kind of “economic froth,” as named by Cliff Taylor in a 2023 Irish Times article, creates an unhealthy reliance on America’s continued offshore manufacturing of products like tech and pharma — a situation that is now under serious risk as the Department of Finance forecasts that the Trump administration’s mooted tariffs could cost Ireland €18 billion in lost trade.  

John Naughton, writing in The Guardian in 2022, foresaw the fragility of the situation, noting that foreign multinationals, mostly composed of the tech and pharma sector, account for 66 percent of Ireland’s exports. If the tech companies move and pharma exports are hit with threatened tariffs from the United States, Ireland’s economy will be deeply exposed. The Irish government and data protection commissioner’s moves to protect companies like Apple and Meta from taxes and fines demonstrate a desperation to hold on to these multinationals at any cost, rather than to imagine an Ireland without them.

Coming so soon after the last recession, it feels like we’re sleepwalking into the same disaster.

Most of my generation, who graduated into the 2008 recession, left Ireland for opportunities elsewhere, much like the many generations before them. But unlike those previous generations, the majority of this one has come home — lured back by a recovering economy and family ties. They’ve been greeted by a buoyant jobs market, with employment currently at 2.8 million, up 3 percent on 2024, and long-term unemployment down to 4 percent. In 2012, in the wake of the downturn, unemployment had risen as high as 14 percent. They’ve also been met by an unprecedented housing crisis, with over 15,000 people of a population of 5.3 million currently homeless. These figures don’t include unaccompanied asylum seekers, rough sleepers, or those in domestic violence refuges. The average rental price in Dublin as of May 2024 is €2,400 per month, with only 2,300 properties listed for rental nationally.

As of 2024, 43 percent of tenants in Dublin rentals were tech workers, and property prices rose 10 percent over the course of that year. To catch up with rising demand, the Central Bank has suggested that 52,000 homes need to be built annually, but in 2024 only 30,330 were completed.

This housing crisis is exacerbated by the country’s tech workers, one-third of whom come from abroad and whose salaries are typically far higher than those working in other sectors earn. (According to the IDA, Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency, around 106,000 people are employed in the tech sector on the island of Ireland, out of a current workforce of 2.78 million.) Reporting for the Swiss daily NZZ in October 2024, Niklaus Nuspliger writes, “In Ireland, there has long been talk of a ‘two-tier economy.’ In the tech and pharmaceutical sectors, salaries are on a par with those in the United States, at over 100,000 euros per year. By contrast, the average Irish salary is much lower, at around 45,000 euros per year.” Ray Cooke of Ray Cooke Auctioneers, a real estate company in Dublin, says tech workers have influenced the surge in house prices over the last five or six years: “A large amount of them are on six-figures and easy people to give mortgages to.” As of 2024, 43 percent of tenants in Dublin rentals were tech workers, and property prices rose 10 percent over the course of that year. To catch up with rising demand, the Central Bank has suggested that 52,000 homes need to be built annually, but in 2024 only 30,330 were completed.

The problem is well known and has even deterred some tech workers from moving to Dublin to pursue lucrative jobs. In 2024, a Reddit user asked in r/cscareerquestionsEU why commentators “almost never mention” Dublin as a good tech hub city despite the fact that it has tons of companies. “What’s the catch? Why isn’t it marketed like the rest?” The top response reads “Dublin is definitely a top 5 tech hub. Problem is the dickensian [sic] renting situation is dreadful value for what you get.”

For those unable to afford an apartment in one of the new developments in the docklands or in the city’s leafier suburbs, housing conditions can indeed be close to the Dickensian. Three-quarters of the rental properties inspected by local authorities in 2024 failed to meet minimum legal standards. When Seven Mills, a new housing development of 40 homes in the western Dublin suburb of Clondalkin, opened in May 2025, hundreds of people queued overnight for three-bedroom homes priced at €400,000. The entire development was sold by 10 a.m. the next day. In Clongriffin, in north Dublin, more than 2,000 people applied for 20 rental homes destined to individuals or families earning less than €66,000 per annum.

Other factors contribute to the housing crisis, of course, many of which the government seems unable or unwilling to overcome: an overreliance on private investment in housing, numerous planning delays, and the exit of large property developers after the 2008 crash. The Ireland that my generation has returned to is full of contradictions, a place where the past and the present coexist uneasily. The city has modernized, and so has our societal outlook in the wake of referenda to legalize gay marriage and access to abortion. But much like the landscape of the docklands, the country’s old bones lie uneasily beneath poured concrete: precarity around housing, homelessness, and childhood poverty, a wealthy and unregulated landlord class, and poor infrastructure are all still present — and familiar to those of us born in the 1980s.     

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Apple, Google, and Meta are still based in Ireland, but in the midst of Trump’s tariff storm, the prospect of losing these tech giants looms larger than ever. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, in this moment of chaos, both Google and Apple have released reports criticizing Ireland’s lagging infrastructure, seeking support from the Irish government on AI innovation and emphasizing that they could be lured elsewhere at any moment. Taoiseach Micheál Martin responded to these threats in a 2025 letter to Apple’s Tim Cook by committing to “reducing the cost and regulatory burden” facing these companies and to “fully realise the economic potential of the digital and AI revolution.” How the government means to achieve this remains to be seen, but the emphasis on AI is interesting, given its catastrophic energy usage and Ireland’s current mortarium on the development of data centers in Dublin because of the pressure data centers place on the national grid. (Data centers are responsible for 20 percent of electricity usage in Ireland.) Lobbying from groups such as Digital Infrastructure Ireland, a group made up of 10 data center operators, has echoed the warnings from tech giants. What would be the impact of a shift of the tech sector away from Ireland? If Ireland were to lose the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) sector’s contribution, it would see a 12 percent decline in direct tax take as per 2024 figures. And, as the Central Bank has pointed out, the “overall fiscal impact of the ICT sector is likely to be larger than this tax data implies, given its connection to other sectors of the economy.”

When asked why these tech giants have made Ireland their home, government bodies such as the IDA will talk about the low corporate tax rate, the educated work force, the fact that Ireland is an English-speaking nation, and the country’s position as a gateway to the EU. All of these things are true, but what is also true is that none of these things matter if more beneficial terms are offered elsewhere.

The government seems to be tensing for the coming blow of these companies’ exoduses. The majority of Apple’s windfall tax, for example, will be invested in a number of strategic funds, which would be used to fund infrastructure projects. This might quell some of the tech firms’ concerns about Irish infrastructure, but the major takeaway seems to be that the Irish government is concerned with future scarcity. There is a growing realization that Ireland’s time as a tax haven for these multinationals must and will come to an end.

When asked why these tech giants have made Ireland their home, government bodies such as the IDA will talk about the low corporate tax rate, the educated work force, the fact that Ireland is an English-speaking nation, and the country’s position as a gateway to the EU. All of these things are true, but what is also true is that none of these things matter if more beneficial terms are offered elsewhere. Sometimes we think of the relationships between governments and these companies as a wooing of sorts, and we do see these kinds of behaviors. Governments often make lofty promises to prevent the companies from straying elsewhere. But though the language of these interactions is couched in that of diplomacy and mutual concern, the reality is that these companies have become so valuable to the economies of countries like Ireland that they are in a position to dictate terms that may not be beneficial to the voters. It’s galling, on a personal level, to read about Tim Cook’s letter to the taoiseach complaining of infrastructure issues “hindering” the company’s growth plans in the midst of a worsening housing crisis, particularly when Apple has benefited so royally from Ireland’s previous low corporate tax rates. When the romance gets rocky, can we trust our politicians to weigh the needs of these companies against the needs of individuals? The government’s inaction on the housing crisis over the past 15 years does not inspire confidence.

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In my parents’ youth, in the 1960s, it wasn’t uncommon for people in Ireland to hang a picture of President John F. Kennedy over the mantlepiece in the “good room,” a seldom-used sitting room reserved for receiving guests. It might hang alongside a picture of Pope John Paul II or a depiction of the Sacred Heart. When I moved with my mother, as a teenager, to a house built by the Sailors and Soldiers Land Trust in the 1920s for Irish soldiers returning from World War I, I found a small ring wedged between the floorboards of my bedroom — it was a Kennedy half-dollar set in a nine-carat gold mount. Too small for me to wear, it must have been made for a child, perhaps sent across the Atlantic by an aunt or uncle living abroad.

Our politicians have clung to the “special relationship” between our nations with traditions such as the annual presentation by our taoiseach of a bowl of shamrock to the American president, a piece of pageantry that many Irish people feel is a little cringe making — pandering to a nostalgic and outdated vision of Ireland.

The U.S. census shows that 9.5 percent of Americans claim Irish heritage, and 6 million Irish people have immigrated to the United States since 1820. In my own lifetime, Ireland has tended to look to American society as a beacon of progressiveness, adopting social policies such as gay marriage and abortion rights — rights that are being stripped away under the current Trump administration. There is, and always has been, a time lag between our two nations: As soon as we in Ireland begin to mirror the nation our ancestors helped to build, the landscape changes again. Our politicians have clung to the “special relationship” between our nations with traditions such as the annual presentation by our taoiseach of a bowl of shamrock to the American president, a piece of pageantry that many Irish people feel is a little cringe making — pandering to a nostalgic and outdated vision of Ireland. But we are also aware it gives our politicians a chance to remind a global superpower of the existence of our small island, to leverage a misty-eyed sense of connection for influence and financial gain.

The current U.S. administration seems less susceptible to our charm. During Taoiseach Micheál Martin’s March 2025 St. Patrick’s Day visit to the White House, Trump said of Ireland’s pharmaceutical sector: “All of a sudden Ireland has our pharmaceutical companies, this beautiful island of 5 million people has got the entire U.S. pharmaceutical industry in its grasp.” In July, he threatened 200 percent tariffs on EU pharmaceutical imports. In August, the EU agreed to a tariff ceiling of 15 percent, but the feeling remains that the only certainty with Trump is uncertainty.

Aside from these practical matters, the tide of Irish opinion has shifted over the past few decades. During the 2003 coordinated mass protests against the British and American invasion of Iraq, Dublin’s protest of 100,000 people is thought to have been the highest per capita turn out. Since then, there have been regular protests at Shannon Airport against U.S. military refueling and use of Irish airspace. In 2015, the Irish Debt and Development Coalition held a protest outside the Department of Finance, calling for the Irish government to make its dealings with international companies more transparent. Apples were handed out to protesters in reference to the low levels of tax Apple was paying. More recently, Ireland’s colonial history and the recent memory of the Troubles means that the population here has a very different perspective on Gaza than many in the United States do, with a poll in May 2025 showing that 86 percent of the Irish population believes Israel’s actions in Gaza to be genocidal.

Somewhere between all these time lags and misconceptions, our attitude to and relationship with the United States has changed. While our political class may still scramble to place itself in front of the latest president in the hope of attracting and maintaining investment in our small nation, for many Irish people, America is no longer the shining city on a hill.

I’ve lost the photos I took that day in 2001, but sometimes when walking through the docklands, I remember the angles of the buildings I photographed. On summer days, droves of local children go swimming in the basin at Grand Canal Dock. This noisy crowd of kids, rampaging though the pristine plaza, come from the remaining local authority flats hidden behind the skyscrapers, and if the weather is warm, you’ll see them jumping into the dirty water below, protected only by flimsy swim suits bought at Penney’s, Ireland’s ubiquitous cheap clothing chain. There are no amenities for them in the area, and everything in the built architecture of the area proclaims them unwelcome, but still they come, weaving between the tech bros on their e-bikes, shrieking and splashing. I think of the strata of the city and how its new skyscrapers are built on the bones of the old docks. From a distance on a rare sunny day, when heat haze blurs their outlines, they seem almost to float above the warren of old streets, like castles built on air.