Eoin Drea: Ireland’s relationship with Big Tech is a bad case of Stockholm syndrome

Irish ministers should have paid fair greater attention to the cautionary tale of the former German chancellor Angela Merkel. The arc of her cratering reputation since her retirement in 2021 bears an uncanny resemblance to Ireland’s decade of political drift over the last 10 years.It also offers a warning as to how political stability – dressed up in successive coalitions of centrist parties – can distract from a much more dangerous reality. Namely, how the desire to retain power at any cost can foster an ideology-free approach to government. This is an approach that favours easy political fixes – preferably with bags of extra cash – over actual economic or political reform.Take Fine Gael. Its longevity – it has been in power since 2011 – correlates to its abandonment of any discernible centre-right ideology. The party’s last vestiges of financial prudence were pushed out the door along with Enda Kenny in 2017.READ MOREAnalysis from the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council shows that Ireland has – and continues to spend – close to 90 per cent of its bumper (and highly unstable) corporate tax receipts. Between 2022 and 2025 alone, Ireland recorded €50 billion in budget surpluses, with no discernible improvement in public services.Irish public spending has doubled in just 10 years. If that’s fiscal rectitude, I’d hate to see us do fiscal prolificacy. But wait, didn’t we already bankrupt ourselves in 2010?A traditional, soft-right conservatism has been replaced by successive leaders for whom policy development is, and never will be, a policy priority.The result – as in Germany under 16 years of Merkel rule – is no meaningful economic reform agenda. Just as Merkel doubled down on cheap Russian gas and exports to China to keep the economy solvent, Ireland burrows deeper every year into our financial dependencies on United States technology and pharmaceutical companies. Neither approach was, or is, sustainable in the long run.Ireland’s lack of vision is all too apparent to onlookers in Brussels, where we are often seen as tax haven opportunists happily in bed with US multinationals. We are increasingly viewed as a freeloader on defence, too. Our constant preaching about our “Europeaness” barely conceals a lack of vision for Europe’s future. This is a remarkable characteristic shared across Ireland’s political spectrum.And recently it has led to some paradoxical situations such as the one in early October here in Brussels. As debate was intensifying about how to lessen the European Union’s dependence on US tech companies, Google was busy throwing a party to celebrate Ireland’s presidency of the Council of the EU. On the guest list were a host of digital industry figures. The guest of honour was the Irish Commissioner Michael McGrath. Outside, across the Rue d’Arlon, academics waved placards and protested against what they saw as Ireland’s incestuous relationship with Big Tech. “When states become captured by corporations, then of course they can’t take decisions in the interest of citizens,” one – Benedetta Brevini, a professor of platforms and society at KU Leuven, and one of 50 academics who recently signed an open letter to the Financial Times on the theme – told the Brussels Times.And while EU states debate how to reduce children’s access to addictive social media platforms, Meta’s Dublin office hosts a full-day event on “Ireland as a trusted digital regulatory hub”, featuring, it said, “regulators, government departments, industry and practitioners in one room”. As noted by Johnny Ryan of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, one of the speakers was Ireland’s former data regulator, Helen Dixon, who now works for a law firm that represents Meta. Where our relationship with Big Tech is concerned, the Irish Government is suffering such a bad case of Stockholm syndrome we don’t even realise we’ve been kidnapped. The ability of policymakers to ignore likely negative outcomes should never be underestimated. Take the cautionary tale of Merkel again.When she left office in 2021, she was heralded as one of Europe’s most consequential leaders. After all, even Covid couldn’t distract from the win-win of cheap energy and lots of cars. Yet now, disavowing her legacy is about the only thing that unites all German political parties – including her own.Like Ireland, across a whole host of issues, Merkel-led governments favoured inaction, delay and prevarication over forward looking, growth-stimulating policies. Instead of delivering on successive campaign promises to improve Germany’s notoriously dated digital infrastructure, German health authorities faced into Covid depending on fax machines and some of the slowest internet speeds in Europe. Despite a decade of low public debt and zero interest rates, Merkelism failed to invest in Germany’s ageing and decaying physical infrastructure. The result since she left office was a German recession in 2023 and 2024, declining manufacturing output, some of the most expensive energy prices in Europe, its heavy industry tackling multiple crises and the state belatedly trying to pump the economy with investment. After deliberately starving their armed forces of appropriate resources, Berlin is now attempting to patch up the damage.Worryingly for Ireland, the Merkel effect illustrates how repeated but slowly diminishing coalitions of the political centre can fuel even more extreme public discontent and distrust. Because as the centrist parties merge into one in the public consciousness, the political extremes may seem to offer the only viable alternative.The inability to make hard economic decisions has also become a characteristic of Irish coalition governments since 2017. Regardless of the crisis – fuel protests, unhappy farmers or constant chronic overspending in the health service – the default response is more money and no reform.But the biggest lesson of Merkelism for Ireland is that periods of relative political and economic calm should not be wasted. Germany stood still while China ate its lunch, lack of spending corroded its infrastructure and a failure to plan long-term diminished public support for what passed as an immigration strategy. The question is not why are extreme parties doing so well in Germany in 2026, but rather, why did no one see them coming? Ireland has similarly squandered the last decade of unprecedented financial health. Most of our corporate tax receipts were spent covering day-to-day spending in areas such as health and education without discernible improvements in service. Delivery on badly needed infrastructure remains slow, expensive and ridiculously bureaucratic. Not even a pandemic, Donald Trump or war in Ukraine has changed the Irish approach. And this is while Irish citizens suffer from among the highest electricity prices in Europe while seven in 10 of our 18 to 24-year-olds consider emigrating. Every year, the productivity of our indigenous small businesses falls further behind the multinational giants. This is what politics looks like when all semblance of ideology has long since vanished. It’s also a German warning for Ireland’s coming – and maybe even inevitable – economic crisis.Eoin Drea is a senior researcher at the Wilfried Martens Centre, the official think tank of the European People’s Party, of which Fine Gael is a member