For those of us who grew up singing songs about Irish nationhood, today is a depressing day. As youths we crooned about how Ireland, ‘long a province’, will one day be ‘a nation once again’. We stood in stiff attention to the Irish national anthem with its promise that Ireland will never again ‘shelter the despot or the slave’. And now we switch on the news and what do we see? A foreign court bossing Ireland around.
Ireland must now go after Apple and demand billions of euros from it
Today, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that Ireland granted Apple ‘unlawful aid’ and must now badger Apple for £11bn in ‘unpaid taxes’. The case was brought by the European Commission (EC). It accused Ireland of giving Apple unfair tax advantages between 1991 and 2014. Ireland did indeed enforce low tax rates on Apple because it was keen to show that Ireland is an ‘attractive home for large companies’. That is, it judged that tax losses were worth it if it meant more tech giants would come to the republic. Unacceptable, decreed the EC, and today the EC won.
Ireland must now go after Apple and demand billions of euros from it. But here’s the thing, the crucial thing, the chilling thing: Ireland doesn’t want to do this. As the BBC sums it up, this is an outcome the elected rulers of Ireland ‘spent years of legal wrangling trying to avoid’. That a small country that’s far from rich doesn’t want to tick off vast corporations makes sense. And yet now Ireland has been instructed to do precisely that, by a foreign court hundreds of miles away.
What do you call a nation that can be forced by foreign judges to do something it doesn’t want to do? I know what you don’t call it: a sovereign nation, a free nation. The EC’s strongarming of Ireland to put aside its own petty democratic desires and go after Apple for ‘unpaid taxes’ represents an intolerable intrusion into Ireland’s internal affairs. The right to set taxes, for both corporations and citizens, is central to a nation’s sovereignty. It is one of the most important rights of free states. It’s a right Ireland has now effectively been robbed of by the EU.
This case exposes how imperious the EU’s rules on ‘state aid’ can be. Everyone – ostensibly, at least – accepts that taxes should be set nationally, by elected governments. Yet the EU’s awesome power to regulate state aid across the bloc means that in this case it could decree that Ireland’s low tax rates for Apple added up to an ‘unfair subsidy’. And thus Ireland was branded a state-aid deviant, an errant nation, and now it must atone for its sins of sovereign decision-making by aligning its tax rules with the EU’s state-aid rules.
It is a very foolish leftist who is laughing at Apple today, who is cheering the ECJ for sticking it to the big tech bosses. For the EU’s state-aid rules are as likely to be wielded against leftish governments that want to pump money into certain industries as they are against governments that give big corporations an easy tax ride. Under the guise of policing state aid, the EU gives itself the border-busting, sovereignty-smashing power to tell governments of all persuasions what they may do with their own resources. No one should support this – not the free-market right nor the state-leaning left.
As for Ireland – I thought we’d agreed to never again ‘shelter the despot’? Yet a foreign court has overruled Ireland’s sovereign wishes and compelled it to pursue a policy it does not want to pursue: I’d call that despotic. James Connolly, hero of the 1916 Easter Rising, said: ‘A free nation must have complete control over its own harbours, to open them or close them at will, or shut out any commodity, or allow it to enter… entirely free of the interference of any other nation.’ Short of these powers, he said, ‘no nation possesses the first essentials of freedom’. We might also add the power to set taxes. A nation that cannot set its own taxes is not a free nation. It just isn’t.
Few in Ireland seem to have the stomach for an honest discussion about the unaccountable power of Brussels. On the contrary, politicians, the media and all the cultural movers and shakers seem content to take the knee to the EC. Indeed, the government has said it will ‘respect’ today’s ruling. Big mistake. There is nothing to respect in the bully-boy tactics of a foreign institution that clearly has no regard whatsoever for the right of the Irish nation to determine its own affairs. How sad that a country that fought so hard for its independence should now sell it off so cheaply to a distant commission.