Why, in contrast to so many others last week, are our leaders so reluctant to stand up to Donald Trump? Because the soft soap has melted in the heat of the new American imperialism. Simpering, sentimentality and shamrock will no longer get us a pat on the head and free pass. Myth and mist have evaporated. We have to learn to talk money.
There’s a reality that is hard for us – accustomed as we are to being grateful for Uncle Sam’s small mercies and large bounties – to recognise or articulate. It is that Ireland is no longer just a beneficiary of American hyper-capitalism. It is an integral part of it.
Here’s a staggering figure to start with: four cents in every dollar borrowed by the US federal government from foreign countries comes from tiny little Ireland. As of last November, Irish entities – investment funds, pension funds, insurance companies, corporations – held $340 billion (€287 billion) of US treasury securities. Germany holds $110 billion.
But this is only the crust on a very deep pie. If we include all kinds of financial wealth (notably stocks and shares), Ireland accounts, according to the Financial Times, for a mind-blowing $2.138 trillion of the $35 trillion of foreign holdings of US assets. That’s more than China, Germany and Spain put together. Those countries have about 1.5 billion people; we have about 5.5 million.
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Now, of course, we all know that money, in an Irish accent, rhymes perfectly with funny. Much of this vast deluge of dollars is accounted for by Dublin-based investment funds who may be channelling wealth from all over the world into the US. These are, nonetheless, a big part of the Irish-American financial nexus: Irish investment funds have half their holdings in US assets.
Even on the level of us ordinary mortals, if you have an insurance policy or a pension fund in Ireland, a large slice of it is going into the American economy. Fully a third of the portfolios of Irish insurance companies are in the US and the same is true for about 15 per cent of Irish pension funds.
These figures point to the extraordinary extent to which Ireland is literally and figuratively invested in the Almighty Dollar. But this is a reality that does not figure much in Irish public or political consciousness.
We know, of course, all about the scale of US investment in Ireland, the immense flow of money and know-how that has transformed a dull little moon orbiting the British economy into a glittering satellite of the American super-planet. Over the 40 years between 1982 and 2022, export sales by US-owned companies based in Ireland increased from $2.8 billion to $443 billion. US corporate assets in Ireland are well over twice as big as those in China and South Korea put together. These sums are astronomical, but they are also woven into our mundane reality. They account (in every sense) for the way we live now.
But the other side of this gigantic gold coin is less visible to us. It is harder to see how the $2 trillion of American assets in Ireland is roughly balanced by the same amount of US assets held by Irish entities.
Remarkably, there are more jobs in the US created by Irish investment than jobs in Ireland sustained by American investment. Figures vary, but in 2023 the US Bureau of Economic Analysis reckoned that 387,000 American jobs were directly or indirectly dependent on the 781 Irish companies operating in the US. That makes minuscule Ireland the sixth largest foreign investor in the US economy. According to the most authoritative report I can find “affiliate employment favoured the United States, with Ireland’s affiliates employing over 215,000 more workers than US affiliates employed in Ireland”.
To get a fix on what 387,000 Irish-dependent jobs might mean in the bigger picture of the US economy, a few comparators help. Italian firms employ 104,900 workers in the US. For Spain it’s 89,9700. For Denmark, which is about our size, it’s 54,900 – less than 15 per cent of what Ireland contributes to employment in the US.
Take it down to ground level. For the state of Georgia, Ireland is the second biggest source of imports and for Illinois the fourth largest. Approaching half of Indiana’s imports from Europe ($21 billion of $47 billion) comes from Ireland. Kentucky’s number one source of imports from Europe is Ireland followed quite far behind by Germany. Ditto Massachusetts.
Oregon’s primary European export market is, by a huge distance, Ireland. In 2023 (the latest year for which I can find figures) $1.3 billion of its entire $3.7 billion exports to all of Europe went to Ireland. This is more than the next four European countries – Germany, Netherlands, Czech Republic and France – put together. Ireland is also Oregon’s second largest import market in Europe, just behind Germany.
Are there all sorts of shenanigans wrapped up in these figures? Sure. Most of Ireland’s trade with the US happens within multinational corporations – one part of the empire dealing with another. But this is, nonetheless, the modus operandi of contemporary American capitalism. It’s not a freak or a fraud – it’s a highly evolved method of fulfilling the prime directive: to make more and more money for shareholders. And it’s become mutual – Irish money migrates westward the way Irish people used to do.
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And that, I think, is why we should stop cowering. Yes, we’ve made ourselves dependent on American capitalism but for America it’s a hugely lucrative dependency. Ireland doesn’t just allow US corporations to limit their taxes and thus boost their profits. It provides a constant transfusion of cash; it funnels funds; it pays wages, fattens shareholders’ bank accounts – and even (by buying all those Treasury bonds) lends Trump’s administration hundreds of billions of dollars.
Of course Trump can destroy us if he wants to. But instead of cringing with fear and trying to placate him with plámás, we need to remind him how much American wealth he would destroy in the process.
