Snow White refused to eat the apple. Its rosy lusciousness invited her to sink her teeth into it, but she resisted. She feared that, if she did, it would be the end of Ireland’s multinational jobs bonanza.
What would the seven dwarves and their friends in Silicon Valley think of her? So she looked the wicked queen in the eye and said: “Tempting as it is, you can keep your €13 billion.” Then the European Court of Justice pronounced: “Like it or not, you’re having it.”
So Snow White accepted the apple, fell into a deep sleep and woke up to find a handsome prince promising to buy her the sun, moon, stars, schools, roads, sewers, turbines, the Olympic Games and anything her heart desired.
That’s the fairy-tale version. In the true Irish life version, Snow White took the apple, kept it in a cupboard for half a dozen years while her little friends lost their homes and US senators called her a shameless tax haven. Now she’s in rehab after betting on the biggest gambling flop in Irish economic history.
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The apple is still in the cupboard but not quite as juicy, after eight years’ a-mouldering and 21.8 per cent consumer price inflation since the wicked queen in Brussels first issued the edict to eat it.
When the European Commission ordered Ireland in August 2016 to recoup €13 billion in foregone tax from i-gadgets maker Apple, this State treated it as a Pyrrhic defeat. It was decided by the Government and a majority vote in Dáil Éireann that the money was not worth the cost to Ireland’s reputation as a global hub for creative accounting.
Michael Noonan, the minister for finance at the time, said Ireland would triumph in its appeal against the commission’s finding of illegal state aid. “My legal advice is that the Irish authorities will win the case,” he predicted in September 2016. “It’s most likely the investigation will be dropped.” That, one supposes, was part of the professional advice that has cost the public €10 million to fight the case. Enough money in itself to have built the 24km Kilkenny greenway with change left over.
In 2013, when the EU started inquiring into Ireland’s tax arrangement with Apple, the State’s day-to-day spending on services had shrunk to €51 billion following the 2008 economic crash. Austerity measures had wrought €20 billion of cuts in public expenditure. The unemployment rate was 13.7 per cent. Tens of thousands of young people were emigrating.
The €13 billion lying in an escrow fund pending the final outcome of the legal challenge could have alleviated some of the deprivation but the Department of Finance claimed EU rules forbade Ireland from spending it on anything other than defraying the national debt. Not true, said the commission, Ireland could spend it however it wanted.
Ireland’s population is growing rapidly. Building infrastructure is going to be an ongoing task. The best option is for the State itself to build houses for its people with the €13 billion bonanza
A burgeoning homelessness crisis is the most visible and enduring consequence of those austerity years of ghost estates and collapsing mortgages. In the year after the EU issued its verdict on Apple, more than 4,000 people were living in emergency accommodation.
The number has climbed remorselessly ever since. By this July, 14,429 individuals were homeless. That number includes 4,401 children but does not account for all those people living in domestic refuges or on the streets, recently arrived asylum seekers or anyone in direct provision with permission to remain in the State but with nowhere else to live.
Nor do the figures reflect the youthful legions leaving Ireland because they cannot afford to acquire a home here, or adults still living with their parents, many of them with their own children. The figures fail to convey the human suffering, mental health ramifications, broken relationships, physical ill health, education disruption, delayed family-making, isolation, worry and stigma caused to people sucked into the vortex of homelessness. Nor do the figures capture the anger that can tear communities apart and turn people against newcomers in the need for someone to blame.
While the Apple money was resting in escrow, a film called Rosie was written by Roddy Doyle and directed by Paddy Breathnach. The eponymous Rosie was a young mother in a family of six who suddenly became homeless in Dublin, reduced to sleeping in their car and brushing their teeth in cafe toilets. In a moment of raw despair, one of the children asks Rosie what is happening to them. “We’re just lost,” she replies.
Ireland owes its lost people. It owes them a way back into society. The way to pay that debt is by ring-fencing the Apple money to build houses. By crude mathematics, €13 billion would fund the construction of 32,700 three-bedroom houses at an average price of €397,000 each.
Ibec might argue that bigger roads are more urgently needed to satisfy foreign multinationals, but the dearth of affordable accommodation is already an obstacle to recruitment for big employers. Building more houses would improve Ireland Inc’s attractiveness. It would also reduce State expenditure on homeless accommodation and on healthcare.
The exchequer has never been richer, even without Apple’s €13 billion. It can afford to build roads and lay train tracks and water pipes. The worm in the apple is not the investment but the State’s abysmal project management, as evinced by the €2 billion-plus national children’s hospital and Leinster House’s glorified bike shed.
Ergo, it has been advocated that social and affordable houses should continue to be built by the private sector, where developers’ built-in percentages automatically drive up the cost. The greater cost of exclusively relying on commercial companies, however, would be the State’s tacit admission that it does not trust its opaque civil and public services, which we employ at an annual cost of about €21.9 billion, to do their job competently in running the country.
Ireland’s population is growing rapidly. Building infrastructure is going to be an ongoing task. The best option is for the State itself to build houses for its people with the €13 billion bonanza. If it can create a reformed Civil Service accountable for every euro of public money it spends so that governments can trust it with the people’s purse, that would be €13 billion well spent. We might even erect a statue in gratitude for the golden egg that the silly goose didn’t want.