Irish writer and poet Jessica Traynor is worried about her native land. In a piece for the Dial, Traynor recounts visiting Dublin Port as a teenager in 2001 and seeing cranes at work transforming the once-gritty docks into what are now known as Silicon Docks—where Google, Meta, and Apple would build their European strongholds. She recounts how Ireland became a tech colony for US giants thanks to rock-bottom corporate tax rates and giant tax loopholes. And where do things stand today? "While their contribution to our GDP has been huge and successive governments have scrambled to make Ireland attractive to them, their benefits to individual citizens can be intangible at best, and at worst, detrimental."
Those detriments include a sky-high cost of living and housing shortages as Ireland copes with a "two-tier economy:" Tech workers might make nice six-figure salaries, but the average Irish salary is a modest $52,000. What's more, she worries that Ireland now has "an unhealthy reliance" on American tech companies, even as they begin to make noises about moving elsewhere unless they get further breaks. Traynor notes that many in her generation moved abroad amid the 2008 recession, as previous Irish generations have done. What's different is that her generation has tended to move back home as the economy boomed. Her warning: "Coming so soon after the last recession, it feels like we're sleepwalking into the same disaster." Read the full piece.
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