The Gist: The Promise of No Change

The past few months have seen a strange dynamic in public discussion. Wherever the possibility of doing something arises, the government has acted to present an equal amount of pressure in the opposite direction. The result is inaction everywhere, in the middle of a set of crises which ought to be triggering a frenzy of activity.

As this pattern repeats itself, the public's frustration with the ability of the political system to deliver change is given space to grow.

With the two historical parties of government now reduced to a single two headed animal, they no longer have access to the pretence of decrying the party in power (while largely doing the same thing if they get in). Now they both have to argue that everything they've done is the best possible thing and nothing that is different can be better. Otherwise, why did they do a sub-optimal thing in the first place?

In business this is called the Innovator's Dilemma. If you are the comfortable incumbent, even if you could launch a new and better product, you don't want to disrupt the successful gig you've got going on. The corollary of this is that "a successful company with established products WILL get pushed aside unless managers know how and when to abandon traditional business practices."

Bring that idea back to politics, and we can see signs of failure in our Civil War parties to abandon any of their traditional practices, even as the world is being disrupted around them.

Let's look at the money, to start with.

The Burlap Sack Economy

Ireland's recent economic success is based around a very simple model. We hold a burlap sack open under a pipe attached to Apple and Microsoft and let a torrent of free cash just pour in.

The CSO's 2024 statistics puts this into some context. Back then we had "income tax amounting to almost €30 billion and corporation tax of more than €28 billion." In 2025 the numbers were €32.9 billion for corporation tax, compared with €36.6 billion for income tax.

Since then, the Burlap Sack has continued to swell, and it is likely that 2026 will see money from corporation tax exceed the entire country's Income Tax take for the first time, as our corporation tax rate goes from 12.5% to 15%.

These are basically ground rents the state collects from these huge companies for using Ireland for tax avoidance and access to the EU. The Government has no way of making those pipes pump out any faster. Short of running state-backed ads extolling the virtues of buying iPhones and Windows licences, it relies on the companies continuing to make money hand over fist and wanting to buy their patches of Ireland as a place to put it.

The one thing demanded of the Government by these companies, as a bloc, is that it leave them alone. They'll pay the tax rent. But, apart from wanting transport to bring their workers to the office and places for them to live, they don't want to hear from the State after that. (You can play a game, and go through the American Chamber of Commerce Ireland 2023 white paper on Ireland: Regulating for Europe's Digital Future, and see how many ideas and lines you've heard repeated by government Ministers since.)

This was a basically good deal while the companies were pedestrian capitalist enterprises, rapaciously selling phones and software licences. The disruption to that comfortable situation has come with technology companies choosing to act as a vector of US fascism and of the social harms unleashed by the vastly expensive race to make the US's AI bubble ever make a single thruppance of profit.

And, as we have seen, our twin-headed pushmipullyu of a government is unable to change its habits to address even the most blatant of these new circumstances. Instead of cauterising the Abuse Factory established by X in Fenian Street in Dublin, through its Grok AI system creating child sex abuse material and facilitating and encouraging the harassment of women through nudification features, the Taoiseach and the relevant Minister rotated on the spot. They seemed to have trouble stating the problem clearly, let alone respond to it.

X is a negligible contributor to the burlap sack. But the institutional habit to shield those FDI companies from attention, let alone criticism, runs so deep that even in the face of gross social harm, the relevant Minister went out of his way to blame users instead of the company that was trying to gain market share off the back of CSAM.

Spare a Sovereign, Guv

This week our closest EU neighbour, France, began to untangle its state functions from US tech companies. France, a nation which adopted a special third kind of TV signal (SECAM) and a special French alternative to email (MINITEL), is hardly a stranger to being willing to go it alone technologically.

But these steps are different from the impulse towards Gaullist national pride. These are closer to the decision to develop a special French nuclear weapons programme, instead of relying on the US NATO nuclear umbrella. The EU is acting on the realisation that US tech companies are a security risk, because the US is no longer a reliable ally.

The realities of acting on that realisation were best described by the PM of Canada at Davos;

In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?

And his answer began with a greengrocer.

Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

Havel called this “living within a lie”.

The system's power comes not from its truth, but from everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

The EU is taking down the signs that indicated trust in the US as an ally. And one of those is that it no longer trusts US technology companies with its national secrets.

But what does the Irish Pushmipullyu think we should do? After all, we've been told that Ireland needs to take a stronger view on its place in the world. The Taoiseach has said we should get rid of the triple lock to regain 'Sovereignty' over our security and military decision making. Surely it's a much lighter ask to move off X for official work? Or perhaps explore Open Source alternatives to Microsoft Office in the cloud? Or, like France, move to European video call providers for state business instead of Teams or Zoom?

Shifting a tech base is hard. But what are they doing to get ready for it, even if it's going to take a while to get right?

The Irish Independent asked Peter Burke, the Minister for Enterprise, about this last week.

"He said its not on his radar right now. "I haven't see any geopolitical pressure around that, personally,", he said "I'm meeting my EU counterparts next week and it's not something that has been raised for the agenda."

This raises inaction to almost a law of physics. Newton's First Law says that an object remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity unless acted upon by a net external force.

Similarly, for an Irish Government Minister, no movement is imaginable unless the Minister experiences an external pressure. Making decisions because the actions might be a good idea doesn't even enter the discussion.

Innovation Minister, James Lawless went further, also talking to the Indo. He said "I'm always a little wary of technology sovereignty arguments, because ultimately we're one planet and ultimately we should embrace the best technology."

If there is anything the first year of Trump2 has demonstrated, it is that, despite the chaos, hostility , fascism and threats to national security, the Irish government is determinded to be the last greengrocer to take down their sign in the window.