Séamas O'Reilly: Here's what I think we should do with Apple's €14.1 billion
Apple logo on its flagship store in Milan, Italy: just look at how run down the place is, it would surely be unfair to deprive them of €14bn
This week, the EU ordered Apple to pay an outstanding bill of €13.8bn to the Irish state, in a landmark ruling covering tax owed from 2003 to 2014, bringing the full total of money on hand from Apple judgements to €14.1bn.
This news, though welcome, was slightly complicated by the well-known fact that the Irish government didn’t appear to want the money and had, in fact, aided in fighting the courts attempting to make this judgement happen.
That process having failed, the Irish state — and therefore all of us — were being served a piping hot plate of €14bn that nevertheless bore the bitter taste of defeat.
From a certain angle, I can understand the Government’s reluctance to take the sum. It seems like a lot of hassle, especially when you consider that Ireland is a perfect country with no problems and a packed schedule of infrastructure projects marching ahead on time and under budget.
The temptation would be, one worries, to spend it on something frivolous or unnecessary; to whip oneself into a frenzy at the sight of a bike languishing, wet and unsecured, outside government; or the threadbare stock of iodine tablets within our homes, by this point very much a national disgrace.
No. We cannot rush out, pockets bulging, at the first sight of a shiny bauble we feel we need. It is a sober and reflective period of calm that’s called for, not a glad-eyed splurge at the seaside sweet shop.
There’s also the personal dimension. Apple are our dear friends, and they really need that money.
Our favourite multinational tech behemoth is currently struggling by on a little over $40bn (€36bn) of pure profit per quarter.
This they have done with little complaint, persevering in their poverty with a quiet dignity that has touched us all.
Though they would never say it, we know the loss of €14bn would hit them pretty hard.
I, for one, shudder to think how many replacement Macbook chargers they’ll have to sell to recoup that amount of money. Six? Seven, even?
But the money’s ours now and it behoves us to deal with it seriously.
Having spent my column last week talking about the long recent history of Irish government overspending, it would be churlish for me to turn around and say I was particularly confident that they’d apportion this money wisely.
In that column, I mentioned eye-watering sums spent on things like the children’s hospital, Bertie’s e-voting machines and the Dublin Metrolink, among a dozen other failed, abandoned, or grossly inflated infrastructure projects.
All of those put together cost the public purse less than a third of the money the Government now has on hand.
I thought there would, at the very least, be a great deal of similar columns for me to write in the future, on an Irish space programme perhaps, or abortive plans to gift every teenager in Ireland their own mech suit.
Unfortunately for my future deadlines, the Taoiseach appears to have other ideas.
“Obviously” he said on Wednesday, “one-off resources cannot be used for day-to-day spending but careful consideration should now be given to how best to utilise this for Ireland and the needs of our country”.
I know when I’m being asked to roll up my sleeves and do the sums for my country, so I will not let him down.
Many will say the first things to solve are the existing challenges Ireland faces.
Current estimates put the current number of unhoused people in Ireland at 14,000.
You might argue this shouldn’t even be up for debate since doing so would not require even the slightest lessening of anyone else’s quality of life, given that this money has — to use a term known primarily to seasoned economists — been plucked right out of God’s arse.
You could also make a decent stab at the housing crisis, currently paralysing an entire generation of young adults in overpriced rental accommodation, or indefinite suspension within their childhood homes.
Last year, Eurostat reported that 68% of Irish adults between the ages of 25 and 29 lived with their parents.
Even after setting aside €200k for every unhoused person in Ireland, you could still build 30,000 new houses with the remaining Apple money, all without raising a penny of tax.
Cynics might say the only reason such schemes have not yet been mooted is because any amount of large-scale house building will lower the value of existing Irish housing stock, which has been allowed to aggregate purely for the enrichment of the property-owning, political-doning, and media-working classes who drive debate in this country.
But that is cynicism indeed. The only real option, obviously, is to give the entire amount back to Apple as a token of friendship.
I’ll not lie, there’s an element of self-interest in this.
Ireland’s current tax arrangements are designed to be as attractive as possible to multinational investment, and we can’t jeopardise that.
They’d all swan off immediately to somewhere with a lower tax rate, presumably one of the many other English-speaking countries to be found within the world’s largest trading bloc, (which are also rated #1 in the metrics of “most educated”, and “highest quality of life” within said bloc).
It’s not just moral, it’s sensible. There is the small matter of the law to contend with but we’re cute enough to get round that.
So I propose we transfer the entire balance in a one-off bulk order of €14.1bn worth of Apple goods.
What, after all, is six Macbook chargers between friends?
