Ireland’s American Problem: The Jockey, the Horses, and the End of the Easy Money Era

The David McWilliams Podcast

David McWilliams

News & Politics

4.5 • 692 Ratings

🗓️ 29 January 2026

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ireland has spent the last two decades riding a unique position: European by treaty, American by economics, a “bridgehead” for US multinationals into the EU, and a country whose prosperity has quietly depended on America’s outsized pull on global capital. But if the US and Europe drift into a real rupture, Ireland becomes the uncomfortable jockey straddling two horses heading in opposite directions. In this episode, we map the cold numbers behind Ireland’s exposure, exports, FDI, and the corporate tax windfall, and then pivot to a genuinely optimistic idea: using the last of the US windfall not just to cushion the future, but to build it. Think infrastructure now, and a Schumpeter-style startup fund that turns the country into an innovation machine before the sugar daddy’s money slows down.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	In a couple of minutes, we have a podcast about what Ireland is going to do in this new global world.
0:05.4	If America and Europe fall out, what is going to happen to Ireland?
0:09.6	Because Ireland is the most Americanized economy in the European Union.
0:14.5	That is all coming up in a couple of minutes.
0:19.3	To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.
0:25.4	This podcast is powered by ACAST.
0:31.9	How you doing there?
0:33.5	Welcome to the podcast.
0:36.8	Today we are going to try and interpret world events through a very self-indulgent
0:43.7	hibernian eyes and see what does it all mean for Ireland, this great global superpower in which we live.
0:50.3	But this great global superpower is the world's most open economy.
0:58.4	It is one of the economies that has benefited most from Pax Americana.
1:06.4	It is, in effect, an American-adjacent economy moored off the coast of Europe.
1:15.5	It is a bridgehead for American companies into Europe that has not always made us friends in high places within Europe, as most clearly evidenced by the Apple tax decision
1:31.3	on behalf of the European Commission in the European Court of Justice, which suggested
1:36.3	that Ireland is involved in tax jiggery-pokery facilitated by our legal system and enriching not just the shareholders of our American companies,
1:48.1	but our own taxpayers here. So we do stand in the dock slightly indicted. But I want to explain
1:56.5	what it seems to me is going on with respect to what Sonny Kapoor said on Tuesday.
2:03.9	If you haven't listened to that podcast, I advise you to listen to the podcast of Tuesday
2:07.8	with Sonny Kapoor, and then this podcast today will make a little bit more sense.
2:14.0	The main idea that Sonny came up with was that there has been an extraordinary concentration
2:21.7	of risk in the United States in the last 20 or 30 years.
	...

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