Samizdata

“When was the last time an American president included Ireland in their vocal – and justified – criticism of Europe for slacking on its commitments? The fact is, with so many American voters claiming Irish heritage, Ireland gets a free pass, something it shamelessly exploits.”

– Richard Kemp, Daily Telegraph (£).

I wonder if Ireland’s fairly low-key approach is a hangover from when, during WW2, it was neutral, presumably out of a reflexive hatred for the UK rather than some deep love of the other side. In the case of another country that gets praise here occasionally – Switzerland – it was also neutral, although the Swiss probably, for military reasons, feared with some justification that if it sided with the UK, it would have been rapidly invaded by its German neighbour. These days, the Swiss have imposed sanctions on Russia, along with the UK, EU and the US, so its own neutrality is fading. And Ireland, as an EU member state, has of course imposed the same sanctions, for what that’s worth. It is not a NATO member – something that might come as a surprise to some people.

There’s a wider issue for those of a free market and economics point of view here. Ireland could be accused, perhaps rightly, of being a “free rider” on other countries that are able and willing to spend serious money on defence. This “free rider problem” is a subject that comes up in economics and public policy, and used to justify, for example, compulsory public spending on things such as highways, education and defence because it is uneconomic and inefficient to charge individuals for the benefits of said, and yet there will always be those who benefit but have no incentive for pay up. Is this behaviour by Ireland a “free rider” issue, and if so, what if anything can be done about it?

Separately, Ireland has for a long time had one of the lowest rates of corporate taxation in the world. President Joe Biden, who likes to flaunt his Irish roots (as many US presidents, in their rather tiresome way, do) has been an advocate of a global pact through which major countries adhere to a minimum tax rate of 15 per cent, and who knows, that might go higher. This counts as a tax cartel, and a country such as Ireland (an EU member state, remember) loses out from that, as do other small EU states such as Malta and Luxembourg. Ireland boomed in the late 80s, and through the 90s, in part because of its low-tax charms. These angered the policymakers of Brussels, who perhaps rightly saw this as a challenge to their desire to create a more high-tax/high-spend regime across the EU. So Ireland can at times be annoying for the right reasons.

What this all comes down to is that Ireland has, in different ways, chosen to stand apart. For all that it might be annoying that Ireland doesn’t supposedly do more on defence (it has a big coastline and requires safe shipping lanes), there’s been a sort of independence of mindset about Ireland that I quite like. (And as a coda to all this, lots of Irishmen, during WW2, defied their country and fought during WW2 against the Nazis, to their everlasting honour.)