Comment: This won’t last forever

It was for this. 

Building the Irish economy, the state, on the corporate tax receipts the country draws through its tax policies arrived at its bottom-line best case this week with the budget. The unexpected and unwanted €13 billion from Apple – “transformational” according to finance minister Jack Chambers – along with successive years of huge returns from other multinationals gave government the chance to show the country just how good things can be, how good things are. 

Financial capital’s expansion from its home countries into other poorer and less globally influential countries is a form of imperialism. Ireland’s decision – through successive governments, photo opportunities with the IDA and encouragement of our indigenous accounting chicanery industry – to constitute the country in such a way shouldn’t be considered a fully proactive choice. There’s a reason why almost every tax haven across the world is a current or former colony. 

The Irish state has long been comfortable in this position though. To be so is to be comfortable with the vicissitudes of the consultancies advising Fortune 500 companies where to move money next, as well as an increasingly frustrated international community, which last month finally won its battle to force Ireland to book that Apple tax. It’s also to be comfortable with the signing away of the country’s sovereignty in international affairs, to implicitly or explicitly condone, sometimes to take part in, elsewhere in the world the same colonialist, imperialist structures that have stunted Ireland’s development. 

How many votes can you really buy?

Fine Gael, Fianna Fáil and the Green Party came together this week to, according to consensus, buy votes in the next general election. I don’t consider there to be much wrong with buying votes. It’s better than begging the electorate in the name of democracy or whatever else our political class can pick up from their US counterparts.

The problem these parties had though, having made the choices they’ve made to establish Ireland as a tax haven/foreign direct investment destination (take your pick), is that there’s only so much you can do with a “transformational” sum, lest you risk transforming the country that delivered it. 

And we couldn't do that. These corporate tax receipts won’t last forever. 

That’s what they say: the Irish Independent in September 2020 said, “It won't last forever, but it will tide us over”; RTÉ in December 2023 said, “It won't last forever, in all likelihood, but it does seem to be lasting a little while longer; the BBC said the positive state of Ireland’s finances in spring 2023 “derived from a particular set of circumstances that won't last forever”; economist Colm McCarthy on Newstalk this May said, “I don’t think anyone expects it to continue”; and the Independent, again, this time yesterday, said, “While the good times won't last forever, the going doesn't look too bad for now.”

Better do something good so. But it can’t be transformational.

‘Nothing to change the relationship between the people of Ireland and the state’

After taking in more than €88 million in corporate tax receipts last year and with the country’s housing crisis showing no sign of abating, government decided against increasing its housing construction targets. “Never before has need been so great, never before have so many resources been available to tackle this, and has such an opportunity to tackle this been squandered,” said Social Democrats housing spokesperson Cian O’Callaghan. Government instead increased the state’s renter’s tax credit to €1,000, effectively subsidising private landlords.  

Ciara Reilly in the Irish Examiner wrote about how the budget made private care – temporarily and slightly – for children with additional needs more affordable. “So even after the ‘biggest giveaway budget ever’, the state is effectively telling us: We can’t (or won’t?) provide adequate services to meet your child’s needs; here’s money to pay for it yourself. It’s privatisation by stealth,” she wrote. 

To address – or more precisely with reference to – fuel bills and the cost of living crisis, public expenditure minister Paschal Donohoe announced lump sum payments to households. These payments, like the renter’s tax credit, will go straight to the energy corporations contributing to the crisis. Friends of the Earth advised against them last month. "Universal energy credits are a short-term solution that offers temporary relief but fail to address the root causes of energy poverty, and do nothing to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels," said energy policy officer Clare O'Connor. 

What these measures have in common, along with the promised bonus payments for social welfare recipients, is that they’re once-off, temporary non-solutions that aren’t promised beyond next year. They do nothing to change the relationship between the people of Ireland, the state and capital. Because to change the nature of this relationship is to change the nature of the state itself. And that’s unconscionable for a government that, along with its forebears, has committed itself to a particular vision. (Included in this vision is support for the country’s horse and greyhound racing industries. The two will share €99.1 million – €79.28 million for horse racing and €19.82 million for greyhound racing. The state has a particularly fond relationship with the people populating these industries, with those who will benefit from the “privatisation by stealth” as Reilly called it.) 

This is it: all those tax returns but all that uncertainty. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council says the budget, bereft as it is of anything approaching a vision, risks "repeating the mistakes of the past". If these corporate tax receipts won’t last forever, will their departure finally force government to change its spending and policies? 

To be subject to the vagaries of foreign capital, to have your state hamstrung in how it approaches its public finances, like this is to remain a subject of imperialism. As part of that uncertainty on whether international corporations will continue to use your country as a dumping ground for profits – sometimes to assuage this uncertainty – our political class has made certain concessions regarding explicitly imperial concerns. 

‘It matters to us’ 

Simon Harris and Micheál Martin say they didn’t know that tens of tonnes of explosives have been shipped over Ireland on their way to Israel. The Department of Transport says its investigation into one airline that illegally carried more than 55 tonnes through Irish airspace to Israel for the IDF is ongoing. The Ditch has since reported on three more airlines – Lufthansa, Delta Airlines and Israel’s national carrier – making similarly illegal journeys over the country. 

As government continues to halt the progress of the popular Occupied Territories Bill, which would ban the sale and import of goods from illegal Israeli settlements, The Ditch has also reported on then finance minister Paschal Donohoe’s “confidential call” with his Israeli counterpart to assure the bill would remain stalled. 

There are moral reasons for opposing Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the West Bank, moral reasons for why these illegal flights and confidential call, which suggest some level of Irish complicity, resonate with some people. There are other reasons why the people of Ireland and the state itself should stand in firmer opposition. To put it simply, “Everything that happens in this world matters to us,” as Hugo Chávez once said. 

In 2009 Chávez had brought a referendum to the Venezuelan people which if passed would allow him to seek an extra term as president. Irishman Rory Carroll, then the Guardian’s Latin American correspondent, attended a live recording of Chávez’s television show Aló Presidente and told Chávez about his concerns about “centralisation of power and risk of creeping authoritarianism”, as he later told Pat Kenny.  

Chávez in his first intervention to Carrroll said,  “I have never seen a European journalist coming here, not even from those more, shall we say critical journalists, to ask, look, what do you all think about the arrival of Columbus here? And the arrival of the British armies – did you know that they speak English in these islands? And the head of state of some of these islands of the Caribbean is still the Queen of England!” Carroll responded, “It doesn’t matter because the question is about this country and you.” 

Chávez told Carroll why it matters. 

“What do you mean it doesn’t matter? It matters to us. Everything that happens in this world matters to us, compañero. Everything matters,” going on to say, “The destiny of your people matters to us, the Irish people. The destiny of the peoples of Europe matters to us. The destiny of the peoples of Africa matters to us. It all matters to us. Because it is the destiny of all of us who live on this planet”. 

The biggest giveaway budget in decades

Aside from ethical opposition to Israel’s ongoing massacre, there should too be an opposition founded more on a simple recognition. 

To claim anything like parity between the Irish colonial and postcolonial experience with genocide in Gaza would be absurd, but it would be equally absurd to fail to recognise the same structures undergirding both. 

Just more than a century after the state gained some level of independence from Britain, during which it only increased its dependence on and submission to foreign capital and financial institutions, its people still feel and live through that colonial past. Our political class seem, if not happy, certainly comfortable with this arrangement. The shortcomings of government parties’ vision for the state, as well as what’s possible for a country reliant on foreign capital, were illuminated to all with what was supposedly the biggest giveaway budget in decades. 

To maintain this state, to further this vision for as long as these tax receipts last, government parties have refused to take meaningful action, whatever they could, against one of the most enduring forms of colonialist violence – of the same character, multiplied many times over, this state itself has experienced for centuries – occurring now in Palestine. Subjects got some once-off payments.

This won’t last forever.