What US Tech Did to Ireland

In the early 2000s, American tech giants established their European headquarters in Ireland, lured by low tax rates and an educated, English-speaking workforce. Meta, Google, and Apple have reshaped the economy, but Jessica Traynor argues in this Dial story that the benefits to citizens have been “intangible at best, and at worst, detrimental.” Building on her previous insights about Ireland’s data centers and strained infrastructure, Traynor describes the country’s unprecedented housing crisis and its deepening dependence on US tech. Reflecting on the transformation of Dublin’s Docklands, she writes, “I think of the strata of the city and how its new skyscrapers are built on the bones of the old docks.” US tech has modernized the country, but what have these companies done to truly improve life for the people of Ireland?

The Ireland that my generation has returned to is full of contradictions, a place where the past and the present coexist uneasily. The city has modernized, and so has our societal outlook in the wake of referenda to legalize gay marriage and access to abortion. But much like the landscape of the docklands, the country’s old bones lie uneasily beneath poured concrete: precarity around housing, homelessness, and childhood poverty, a wealthy and unregulated landlord class, and poor infrastructure are all still present — and familiar to those of us born in the 1980s.