There’s a revisionist Irish history that goes like this.
Theocratic backwater Ireland was destitute after its partial emancipation from British rule. With an uncertain future ahead our leaders took the bold step to open us up to US multinational corporations. We offered competitive tax rates and bespoke infrastructure to those who sought to invest. Captains of industry created thousands of jobs and contributed billions to the state’s finances. An economic miracle had occurred. Ireland ascended to the status of a modern country.
This was the start of our journey to where we are now – an “island at the centre of the world”, as then taoiseach Leo Varadkar said to Time in 2017.
The story we tell about our development, led by foreign direct investment (FDI) – which according to figures the Department of Finance released this month generated more than €30 billion in corporate tax receipts in 2025 – is a lie. And this lie obscures that this island at the centre of the world is a colony of US capital.
Our delusions of a “special relationship” with our master, which under Trump has abandoned the pretence of regarding Europe as anything other than victims of a mafia-style extortion racket, cannot be sustained. Trump's foreign policy – he calls it the "Donroe Doctrine" – spares us tedious debate.
Typically when the US invades or attacks another country, we must engage with arguments about exporting democracy. The current president doesn't bother. He’s openly and repeatedly said his state’s actions are based purely on perceived imperial interest. Gaza, in his words, would make a great site for real estate development. Venezuela, he said, faced American aggression because it nationalised its oil reserves for the benefit of Venezuelans rather than, say, Exxon Mobil executives.
Even Fintan O’Toole gets it
Meanwhile the EU, a bloc content with US aggression when it wasn't directed at Brussels, is subject to a pressure campaign. Trump continues to threaten to annex Greenland “the easy way" or the “hard way". His reasons are purportedly strategic. The Arctic island has untapped natural resources and Trump claims, without evidence, that China and Russia want to occupy it. In a statement characteristic of European deference, Danish ministers said their country and the US “agree to disagree".
The Irish political establishment pretends the US doesn’t control Ireland. They publicly and aggressively deny certain realities – like that the US is an imperial power.
Last year the media attacked Catherine Connolly for describing it as such, questioning her fitness for office. Whether she was correct seemed a technicality – journalists needed to know whether she’d prostrate herself to empire if she sat in the Áras. At one point, during an RTÉ debate, host Áine Lawlor asked candidates how they intended to "flatter" Donald Trump if elected, a question which, if asked of a Kazakh politician about Vladimir Putin, would be invoked in the west as proof of a humiliating lack of sovereignty.
Even Fintan O'Toole, who recently conducted a simpering public interview with Barack Obama – a war criminal who presided over drone campaigns in the Middle East and Africa; who destroyed Libya; who set in place a surveillance state now exploited by a fascist insurgency – acknowledges our predicament. “For the first time since independence," he wrote in the Irish Times on Tuesday, in reference to a tweet by the US State Department claiming this hemisphere belongs to the US, “a superpower has formally affirmed its right to hegemony over Ireland."
Elsewhere outlets like The Times reports on the thousands of US military flights that pass through Irish airspace every year. “It has become painfully clear we are being used as a puppet regime for America and it is a shame on our own history,” Social Democrats TD Gary Gannon told the paper.
Imperialism and the price of prosperity
It’s positive that we may have a national conversation about our submission to the US.
Last year academics Patrick Bresnihan and Patrick Brodie, authors of From the Bog to the Cloud: Dependency and Eco-Modernity in Ireland, and I wrote a report on this matter. In The Price of Prosperity: How US FDI is Enabling Genocide in Gaza and Eroding Our Neutrality, we examined how the 26 counties' economic model undermines its democracy, leaves it bereft of infrastructure that might serve the public and implicates the state in genocidal violence.
Dependency on a handful of US multinationals has brought us a governing philosophy – Pat and Paddy called it FDI Nationalism in their recent book – that considers US corporate and Irish national interests as the same.
The likes of IDA Ireland, semi-state agencies, lobbying groups like IBEC and think tanks like the Institute of International and European Affairs maintain this assumption. It manifests in the ritual humiliation of St Patrick's Day at the White House, in proclamations like that of James Reilly, who as health minister called our corporation tax rate “sacrosanct”.
The US tech giants we've built our economy around are, in the words of UN special rapporteur Francesca Albanese, “embedded in an economy of genocide”.
Amazon’s cloud servers in Ireland process data for Israeli military operations. Microsoft's infrastructure here enables the mass surveillance system that records Palestinian phone calls before their homes are bombed by the Israel Defense Forces. Between 2023 and 2025 at least ten commercial airlines used Irish airspace to transport weapons for use in Palestine and aimed at Irish peacekeepers – flights requiring ministerial approval that was never granted. Then taoiseach Simon Harris admitted they were violations of Irish law. But nothing happened because the leader of this country is, under the current arrangement, a de facto viceroy.
Efforts to militarise Ireland's economy, to further integrate us in NATO structures and an EU with aspirations for its own military, are related to our addiction to US money.
Yesterday The Ditch published a story about an internal Defence Forces document from 2017 that linked military expenditure to attracting FDI. "To attract foreign direct investment," the Communications & Engagement Guidelines said, “Ireland must be able to defend itself against modern threats." It predates Russia's invasion of Ukraine by approximately five years – the crisis Micheál Martin cites to justify increased defence spending and removing the triple lock.
Martin’s trip to China last week gave a glimpse of what reduced dependency on the US might look like.
Ireland should pursue its own interests (and curiously no one accused the taoiseach of being a “star of authoritarian state media" – a charge reserved for Clare Daly and Mick Wallace for questioning NATO expansion and US foreign policy). As our best friend kidnapped the president of Venezuela, Martin was in Beijing positioning Ireland as a bridge between China and Europe. This was smart and he should do it more often.
The alternative – further vassalage, further complicity in genocide, further dismantling of neutrality – only serves the sliver of Irish society that benefits from our obedience.
