Dublin ‘can’t trust itself to do the right thing’: Why Irish EU presidency should recuse itself from

There is a type of room, Irish activist Johnny Ryan tells an audience the day before we speak, which exists in the small Irish houses his country built in a wave of construction in the 1960s: the biggest room at the front, usually unused, dust on the silver, fine linens. It is only opened when the priest comes for tea. “Ireland’s presidency is like us getting the special room ready,” he says on stage at the Re:Publica conference in Berlin earlier this month adding: “This is the moment when Irela

He is unusually succinct for a critic of Big Tech – his crusade pretty much fits on a postcard: Europe’s digital enforcement crisis is, in essence, an Irish enforcement crisis. The country that hosts almost every American tech firm’s European headquarters is also the country that has decided not to police them. And on 1 July this year, that country takes the rotating EU Council presidency and inherits the agenda-setting powers on the EU crown jewels of tech-laws: Digital Omnibus, the AI Omnibus, the implementing acts of the AI Act, the Cloud and AI Development Act, the Digital Networks Act, and the GDPR. Ryan’s worries are not based on vibes or general misgivings. He blew the whistle on the online-ad industry’s real-time bidding system in 2017, from inside it, and filed the first formal GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) complaints against Google’s ad-tech the following year. Johnny Ryan is director of Enforce, a unit of the Irish Council of Civil Liberties that advocates, investigates, and litigates to protect people in the digital age. He is known for global campaigns against Big Tech surveillance, leading to major lawsuits and regulatory actions targeting the ad-tech industry. Ireland’s job, by way of how the GDPR was drafted, is to defend the rest of Europe when it comes to the tech companies headquartered there. Whichever country a multinational picks for its European headquarters becomes the supervisor responsible for the data of citizens in every other member state – a hospital in Hamburg, a school in Lille. Meta, Google, TikTok, Microsoft, LinkedIn, X, Apple all picked Ireland. So did most of their AI activity. Which means, in Ryan’s words: “Ireland is responsible for defending the rest of Europe when those companies abuse Europeans’ data.” In short: if Dublin doesn’t move, nobody moves.

Key points

• He is unusually succinct for a critic of Big Tech – his crusade pretty much fits on a postcard: Europe’s digital enforcement crisis is, in essence, an Irish enforcement crisis.
• The country that hosts almost every American tech firm’s European headquarters is also the country that has decided not to police them.
• And on 1 July this year, that country takes the rotating EU Council presidency and inherits the agenda-setting powers on the EU crown jewels of tech-laws: Digital Omnibus, the AI Omnibus, the imple…
• Ryan’s worries are not based on vibes or general misgivings.
• He blew the whistle on the online-ad industry’s real-time bidding system in 2017, from inside it, and filed the first formal GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) complaints against Google’s ad…