How Corporations Setting Agenda Ireland’s EU Presidency

It’s how politics actually works - the bosses line up to impose their will on the politicians. Ireland has become a major hotspot of corporate lobbying as the country takes on the EU Presidency.

Hundreds of lobbying meetings have been noted on the lobbying register as multinationals and industry representative bodies argue for pro-boss policies. The Irish government has met international banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup; tech giants including Meta, Google and OpenAI; and a load of big pharma firms, from Pfizer to MSD.

American big pharma firms like Abbvie, Pfizer and MSD have all been lobbying to highlight the importance of competitiveness of the industry in Europe. That’s code for lowering wages and attacking workers’ rights.

The US companies were joined in their efforts by Germany’s Bayer, Belgium’s Jannsen, Swiss pharma giant Novartis and British firm GSK, who all also met the Irish government and show up on the lobbying register.

All of these big companies have lobbied a second and some a third time through big industry groups like BioPharmaChem Ireland and the Irish Pharmaceutical Healthcare Association, showing that they don’t stop until the politicians give them what they want.

The big tech corporations: Apple, Amazon, Google, Meta, OpenAI, PayPal and TikTok all submitted returns on the lobbying register. They want simplicity of policy and “competitiveness” too. They also sent their industry body, Digital Europe, which represents more than 56,000 businesses including all those named above, to meet the government.

They also demanded the Irish government slash “red tape” - these corporate bosses don’t like having rules and regulations that get in the way of global conquest and dismantling workers’ rights.

Revolut met the government too and has been specific in its calls, highlighting that Iban discrimination and anti-money laundering regulations are still significant obstacles for it.

It doesn’t end there. Mars Foods, Kellanova, Aer Lingus, Valero Energy and Bolt all submitted lobbying while larger lobby groups like AmCham and Business Europe have pushed hard to bend the Irish government’s ear.

BusinessEurope, the umbrella body representing 42 bosses’ federations, 20 million companies from 36 countries, brought its Council of Presidents to Dublin, where it met foreign affairs ministers Helen McEntee and Thomas Byrne.

Your vote doesn’t mean much when policy is dictated by the bosses as they wine and dine compliant politicians and use their immense economic power to threaten any move by politicians to change course. They usually get what they want.

The Irish government uses funds extracted from foreign multinationals to help giant Irish corporations like CRH or Smurfit play on the world stage and exploit a global workforce. That’s why the government want closer integration into Europe at the expense of our neutrality.

The Russian revolutionary Lenin once wrote that voting alone could not challenge this dictatorship of the rich:

“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament–this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary- constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”

Voting can help put a working class voice in a council or the Dáil, a platform they can use to empower workers and call for struggle against the state. But that’s it.

Lenin argued that the capitalist state is “bound by thousands of threads to the bourgeoisie” and that no matter who we vote in it remains a dictatorship of the bosses.

The Irish government are nothing but puppets of the rich. And most political parties want to replace them as future puppets of the rich. We need to cut those “thousands of threads” if we want to decide our own fate.

That’s why we need a rebellion to put workers in the driving seat of a democratically planned economy where we actually call the shots and not the corporations.