Why Ireland Must Rethink Its Economic Future; Fast

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1:04David McWilliams: To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by Acast. How are you doing there? It is time for the podcast. And the podcast today is going to be all about the implications, John, of the tariffs and the rapid change in American foreign and economic policy and the implications for Ireland. In the sense that, John, we may well be moving from taco to wacko, right? And that means we may well be moving, right? We're maybe moving from tacos, which is Trump always chickens out, to wacko, which is the world always chickens out. it has been noted that the only two powers that have retaliated aggressively to America are Canada, the power that people thought wouldn't do, and China, the power that people thought would do.

2:05The two cacos. The two cacos. And Waco now. Waco, Texas. Remember Waco, Texas? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Right. Okay. Waco. Waco may well be the world chickens out. We touched on it last week when we were doing the issue of immigration, which is that the European Union, which has now been singled out by the Americans, and they realize that the weakness in the European Union is the weakness of the weakness link in the chain. We may well be the weakest link in the chain. As in Ireland? Yes, because we are so heavily, heavily exposed. As I've said before, we are an American adjacent economy. So we have by far the most to lose in a trade war with the United States.

2:53So the Irish government is now, as we speak, lobbying hard in Brussels to try and prevent a unilateral stance from the EU, even though they are trying to present in public a unified face. And can Ireland, like, what's Ireland's pitch then to Europe? No, we don't have any leverage, right? Since the Apple tax decision, which is now a year old, when the European Court of Justice upheld a European Commission allegation that Ireland was involved in tax, not evasion, avoidance. and the very deliverance of the 13 billion, do you remember the 13 billion? Yeah, yeah. It was evidence that Ireland is involved in a, or had been in the past involved in tax avoidance strategies that are contrary to the interests of the European Union.

3:57So we are now an outlier. Whatever influence we had, the idea that we were nice people and they liked us and we were good fun, that's all gone now. What they're looking at is, if Ireland is the one to pay, well, so be it. because over the last 20 years, Ireland has done extremely well. But at the same time, you know, yes, the Apple tax thing and also how hard they fought for the backstop during Brexit and all that kind of stuff. But also now, Ireland is a net contributor to the EU only because we have this amount of tax coming in. And the GDP associated with it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. But I think our contribution is very small in comparison to the likes of Germany.

4:39Our only saving grace in this is that large companies like Germany and France also are divided on retaliation. The French, particularly because of French agriculture, but also very French high-end production, high-end luxury goods, LVMH, all those sort of stuff, right? And of course, German cars go to the United States. So I would say the chances of the European Union responding in any meaningful, robust way are almost zero. That gives Trump a carte blanche to continue doing what he's doing. Because if nobody retaliates, what that does is that signals to him that he's been right all along, that might is right in America first and all that sort of stuff.

5:27And we could well be, there's two ways of reading this, John. If nobody retaliates, Trump might decide, I've won the game and go back, take the victory, the sort of the braggers victory and go back to the negotiating table, being advised by corporate American giants to say, listen, this is not a good idea. Or he could double down, John. And he could double down and say, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go for a real America first. We are going to cut ourselves off. We are going to put up tariff barriers. We are going to begin the process whereby America re-industrializes again under the umbrella of tariffs.

6:05The only issue, and you suggested it to me off air, John, the only issue is that tariffs is a massive, it's a real MAGA project. It's not from the gene pool of the Republican, let's say, country club corporate Republican strategy, which is always open trade, more immigrants, free movement of capital, free movement of goods, bottom line. And as you pointed out, there are signs of splits in the MAGA movement. Yeah, big time. One of them will be if Trump were to back down from tariffs because tariffs is a MAGA policy. So I would say that, you know, a straw in the wind is whether or not MAGA is split on foreign intervention because foreign intervention is the opposite of tariffs.

6:54So the MAGA guys don't want foreign intervention, as you know. They want America to basically say to the rest of the world, fight your own wars. Tariffs are again America pulling back from the rest of the world. It is going to be interesting to see who wins that battle. Up until now, corporate America, if you think of the last six months, MAGA was on display until Liberation Day. Do you remember Liberation Day, John? I do, I do. Then the stock market collapsed. Corporate America got back into the driving seat. And all these ideas, all that, well, we might not tear a few, we might tear a few, we might look at that again.

7:34That's all the victory of corporate America. And now what we have in the last two weeks is MAGA back in the driving seat. So it's kind of a seesaw between MAGA and corporate America, MAGA and corporate America. What we want to focus on now, but just before I answer your question, is what it means for Ireland. Europe so far has been kind of laying low, not really responding. Seems like a bit of a tactic. But they do, or they had mentioned that they have this big bazooka, whatever that is, to hit back at America. But the other thing I was going to say is, I was reading there that Trump has claimed that he has earned$50 billion so far in revenue from the tariffs.

8:21Yeah, but the point is, who pays the... That's got to be sniffed at. Who pays the... But it's just a tax on Americans. No, no, I know. Yes, I know. It's the ridiculous thing. He said, I'm going to tell you, I've taxed you by$50 billion. Like, we're not paying the stuff. Americans are paying it. It's how he's spinning it is the thing. But the point is, this is why this podcast is important. Because you see through the bullshit, right? Yeah. Basically, who is paying the$50 billion that they have raised in the last two months, fucking Americans, we're not paying it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's like, if you think about it, like the big beautiful bill is all about giving tax breaks to the rich.

8:57Yes. Tariffs is about imposing tax hikes on the poor. Yeah. So it's, well, listen, let's focus on our United Little Ireland because it is Tuesday and our usually Tuesday podcasts tend to focus more local or domestic, let's say. And of course, if this marks a rupture in the global state of affairs, and if this marks a lockstep change in American policy, then you have to go back to the early 90s. And actually, interestingly, a period where Peter Sutherland, the Irish head of GAT, was busy unpicking tariff barriers at the GAT, which is the Global Agreement of Trade and Tariffs, right? If you actually go back there, what you see is a correlation, a dramatic correlation between the reduction of global tariff and trade barriers and the rapid acceleration of the Irish standard of living and the rapid acceleration of Irish GDP and the rapid acceleration of multinational investment in Ireland.

10:06So if there is a country that has sailed effortlessly through the period when tariffs were being reduced, it is Ireland. You can almost say that Ireland's progress, if you want to, is matched by industrial America's decline. Because those companies that would have been in industrial America, like the pharma companies, came here. Those tech companies that might have had their back offices in industrial America came here. Those healthcare companies that might have had some of the operations in industrial America came here. So in a way, and this is where Lutnick was right a couple of months ago, Ireland has been the outsized winner in a world where America presided over the reduction of tariffs.

10:59Does that mean Ireland is going to be the outright loser in an America that is presiding over an increase of tires, I'm not sure. But you have to be alert that that could be a possibility. And what that means then, John, is we have to figure out very quickly a plan B. Because we ended last Tuesday's podcast on immigration, on house building, and on the drift. Remember the government drift idea that, you know, you can drift when you've got loads of money. You've got a big budget, so everything's grand, everything's fine, don't worry, we don't have to make any decisions. now we are in a situation where we will have to make or we we need to make massive decisions about the structure of the irish economy rapidly because like all small countries remember i always say if you're a small country you're a rule taker you're not a rule maker yeah yeah yeah and the your ability to adjust and adapt is what makes you interesting and also small countries john live and die by the quality of their strategic thinking, much more so than big countries.

12:04So right now, we are being set a timetable by the White House, not by Merion Street or anything in Irish politics, which is saying, Ireland, those years are over. You've got to figure out a new industrial model, which involves creating our own industrial companies. Yeah. And that's really hard to do. We've been saying that for quite a while, though. We have been saying it quite a while. But I mean, again, what I'm saying is that the reason we were saying it for quite a while is that the role of the podcast and these sort of discussions is to say, OK, here's the mainstream. Here's where 90 % of people are coalescing.

12:45Here's the It'll Be Grant. Our job in the podcast is to say, well, look, if that were to happen, if that were to happen, what do you do? It's always to second guess the mainstream consensus thinking. So we've been saying that for a while. But I just think, you know, you think about trying to build a startup culture from start to finish with unicorns, with international market share, with domestic capital bases, with networks. It's really, really, really difficult. But I think over the course of the next five years, that has to be the singular focus of industrial policy. You have the IDA, which brings in foreign companies.

13:24You have Enterprise Ireland, which seeds and funds domestic companies to turn them into international companies. But what needs to happen is change in the Irish mindset. Like, why do we not have entrepreneurs? Why do we not have companies? Why did, for example, Ozembek come from Denmark and not from Ireland? Right? Think about it. No, really, because we have a massive healthcare system. We have a massive pharma system. The Danes do as well. But the Danes are the ones that created the most valuable company in Europe, the company that makes its MPEC. While we continued to be recipients of direct foreign investment, but with no particular...

14:06Well, we had Viagra, in fairness. Yeah, but we didn't make Viagra. We just took it. Right? We do make it, though, aren't we? Yeah, but it's not ours. Yeah, we do make it. We don't own the product. The product is owned by Pfizer. It's owned by Americans. Yeah. We just make the stuff here. And the idea is to go from manufacturing to innovation. And the Danes are the ones that are actually doing this in the pharma sector, not us, even though we have a massive pharma sector. So I think this should be the focus of our discussion, John, which is how do we shift the emphasis in Ireland away from multinationals to local investment?

14:46But more importantly, how do we, in some way, piggyback on the multinational presence here to create our own companies? And I think nobody better to talk about that than Patrick Walsh of Dogpatch Labs in Dublin, which is a startup incubator. Patrick's at the Cold Face. Why don't we go and talk to Patrick Walsh?

15:06David McWilliams: We're now going to talk to Patrick Walsh of Dogpatch Labs. You might know Dogpatch Labs down in the IFSC, an incubator, which has been a hub of activity, of innovation, of creativity. And let me just say that elixir of innovation, which is contact, communication, people of similar ideas coming together, chatting away. Patrick, how are you? Great. Great to be here. Listen, Patrick, explain to me, we talked about Europe, you know, the great, and I've heard it many, many years ago from Americans is the Americans will look at Europe and say, where's the European Google? And that, in a nutshell, crystallizes the problem with Europe is that Europe has not created companies of significant scale at a significant fast clip in the last 15 or 20 years.

15:56David McWilliams: This is what Mario Draghi talks about. If we're pushed towards Europe, we're pushed toward that world. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the other thing that came out late last year was this big report from Draghi because Europe is actually actively shrinking on the world stage at the moment, right? Our share of global GDP has fallen from 30 to 20 % over the last two decades. The US economy has been growing at twice the rate of Europe. So we have this real challenge. So they turned, policymakers turned to Draghi, who is the man who saved the euro. They always do. They always turn to Draghi. Well, he sorted it out the last time, you know, whatever it takes speech, you know, They call him Super Mario and he is one of our best thinkers and he's definitely someone we should listen to.

16:41So he did this huge big piece of work on why are we shrinking? And the primary thing he came back with in this big long report was that we are not innovating enough. We are not enabling entrepreneurship to happen at scale. There's too much bureaucracy. There's too much fragmentation. You mentioned creating big companies. He actually points that out, which is in the last 50 years, there has not been one European company that has reached a market cap of 100 billion. Meanwhile, in the US, there has been six companies worth over a trillion. Actually, 30 % of our unicorns, which is a billion dollar company, actually leave Europe because they're not scaling fast enough because of all the regulations.

17:21That's jobs and opportunities and venture returns that are not happening. So he points this out as a really big challenge because innovation, he says, is the number one thing that's going to make the difference.

17:33David McWilliams: Now, the interesting thing is that Ireland had managed up until now to sort of straddle, as I say, the two horses, the European horse and the American horse. We were in the European camp in terms of legislation and political persuasion and all the nice things. And we had access to this massive, massive market. but because of our technological background i also think our cultural background the fact that we speak english we're kind of i always call ireland is kind of connecticut with shitty weather right and that's what we should try to be okay as an economy but but if we allow ourselves to become unmoored from the americans yeah we will then end up in a camp that doesn't appear to be dynamic enough to generate the sort of economic growth that generates the tax, that generates the money, to generate the quality of life that you need.

18:27That's right. And that, I mean, we will be more tied to Europe's faith and Europe's faith is not a good picture right now. And the one thing that Draghi is saying that will make the difference is that we need bold, decisive action to ignite European dynamism. And he talks about that the time for incrementalist thinking with respect to this is over. You know, this brand of, you know, America innovates, Europe regulates is not serving us that well.

18:55David McWilliams: What are the French doing? Because I know that French tech is something you hear quite a lot about. You hear a lot about startups in Paris, et cetera. What are the French doing that is a, that's kind of at least moving in the right direction? Well, let me take a step back just for one second. So Ireland obviously has this unique advantage with the multinationals. We have the biggest cluster. But our challenge is that we're largely seen as an operational hub for these companies, largely speaking. There is R &D that happens here, rather than an innovation hub. And nowhere is that more evident than AI, which is by far the largest innovation priority of all the big tech companies.

19:32I mean, this year alone, Microsoft will spend 80 billion euros on AI. Yet when we look at all these multinationals, Meta, Google, Microsoft, all of their AI labs where they do the hard fundamental research within the EU context are actually in Paris, not Dublin. There isn't a single AI lab from a big tech company that's in Dublin. Why is that? Well, I think it is because Macron stood up and he said, we're going to create this innovation economy. He actually declared Paris will be the city of AI. And he enacted a whole set of policies, procedures. He created this focused government agency that was focused on tech alone.

20:16And instead of putting that agency in a government building, he actually put it inside their massive startup hub called Station F. And they were very intentional because they kind of knew that AI labs don't just drive research, They spark ecosystems. You know, they attract global talent. Some of those people will go out and start companies. That draws in the venture capitalists, which attracts more talents. So it creates this flywheel effect of innovation, right? So Mistral, which is one of Europe's top AI startups, is actually employees that went through a Google and Meta lab in Paris.

20:56David McWilliams: But you see, this is what I'm hoping just to break it. This is what I was hoping that, you know, for example, across a whole area, not just tech, but also life sciences, medical devices, that we would have seen the same thing in Ireland. People would have started in company A, learned their craft and said, you know what? I fancy doing this on my own. Is there infrastructure here? Yeah, there are. There's a couple of grants we can get. I can get a maid of mine. We can sit around. We have an idea for a product. Can we get an investor? Yeah, actually, we have got somebody investor. Well, somebody knows somebody else.

21:24David McWilliams: And suddenly the process of jumping from being an employee to being a creator or an entrepreneur begins. And then, as you say, what you need then is heroes. You need people who've gone before you. And people who've gone before you say, this is how it's done. And suddenly then you create the vibe. You create the vibe. Yeah. And I think Ireland isn't fully capturing that crossover effect. That is possible. And I think what the lesson from France is that they were very focused and very intentional about trying to make that happen. And this idea that the multinationals can and should be these catalysts for innovation is something that we need to think about as we try and shift from our economy today to being a much more innovation-driven economy.

22:13That's just one aspect of all the things we need to do. But that is an important story and lesson for us to think about because all of these companies are here. You know, Anne O 'Leary, who's the chief of Meta, announced Meta's AI startup accelerator in Paris, not Dublin, because obviously there's that innovation flywheel is happening there. I'm sure that idea wasn't taken lightly. But, you know, it's a shame that it isn't happening here. You know, so there's all these things that flow on from that. And we have these ingredients. We just need to get more intentional about how we unlock it. Patrick, how much of that decision was down to other factors such as, say, housing and infrastructure that is not available here?

22:58I mean, I think we shouldn't be unclear that housing is probably one of the biggest barriers to entrepreneurship in Ireland. You know, because if you've got a huge rent, you have much less cash to take that kind of a risk. So I don't know if those specific decisions were largely focused around that. I mean, I think there was a very big plan and focus around it, but it's probably certainly contributed to it. And like anything, housing impacts everything in our economy and innovation and entrepreneurship is a big part of it. So we can get all hung up on the best policies in the world, but we also need the best infrastructure as well.

23:37David McWilliams: So let's go back to Ireland. So Ireland has this enormous but possibly depleting advantage, which is the presence of multinationals. You have made it very, very clear, as you said, Adam O 'Leary announces Meta's AI in Paris, even though Meta's European headquarters is here. Very few significant corporations involved in any proper innovation. As you say, we're operational, we're sales, we're advertising, we're that side of the game. When you look at the landscape, what do you think can be done in Ireland to take advantage of the fact that we have an advantage, but that that advantage, given what's happening in Washington, may well be depleting?

24:19David McWilliams: What can we do right now? Well, I think any of this needs to start with the ambition, you know, the vision to have an innovation economy, you know. And that bold thinking is actually something that has marked and defined who we are since we started. I mean, one of our first acts as a state was to spend 20 % of our entire annual budget on a single project, which was building the largest hydroelectric plants in the world. I mean, it was proper cathedral level thinking. A hundred years later, that thing is still powering Ireland. Ardnachrusha. Ardnachrusha. Amazing story. In 1933, Ireland was, and this is an amazing thing, Ireland's electricity grid was 92 % renewables.

25:06Wow.

25:07David McWilliams: Because it was all hydroelectric. Because it was, yeah. Because it was all natural. It's just, so, you know, I mean, if you fast forward 1958, T.K. Whitaker, a civil servant, wrote a visionary white paper that was very bold and shifting us from being protectionist to being one of the most open globalized economy in the world. Or in the 80s, you look at the IFSC, which, you know, recession, unemployment, emigration, this idea of becoming, you know, a major financial hub in the world. So I think what we need to start with is this IFSC level thinking, but this time to build an innovation economy.

25:47You know, we need to start with that and then we need to figure out what needs to happen underneath it. Now, the interesting thing about the IFSC is it was actually two individuals, Dermot Desmond, who had a huge vision, but also a massive financial interest in getting the project up and running.

26:02David McWilliams: And Charlie Houghy, who is much lamented, much besmirched, much degraded, much commented on, but had that sort of idea, well, let's just do it because we have no choice. Do you think that we will need a jolt from America, which is so significantly detrimental to us, to put our political class in that 1980s point where they say we have no choice? Because at the moment, we're kind of, we're grand. The economy's growing. Tax revenue's coming in. Everything's moving along. There's no sense of crisis or urgency. yeah I mean I think of course back then there was a sense there would you know our backs were against the wall things were bad so there was this sort of sense of well there's nothing to lose we have to do something whereas we're in a very different position today but that could change and I'd like to think we're you know we're not going to have to wait for Lutnick to to start to maybe whether he's successful or not we should be doing this now and investing now for the long term when we have the opportunity to do it.

27:09You know, that's what I'd like to think. But there is, you know, an emerging picture now, which is much more of a burning platform between what's happening in Europe and what's happening in America than there has been for many years, you know?

27:22David McWilliams: The burning platform, explain that to me because I'm only a poor old economist. I like the image. What is it? Well, I was speaking to someone in government who's since retired a few years ago. And I said, you know, why aren't we being as ambitious in the, you know, as we were in the IFSC? You know, we took corporation tax and dropped it from 50 % to 10%, you know? That was very bold thinking, you know? These were big moves. And he said, well, there's just not enough of a burning platform. What it means is it's not really an issue. Like, we're grants. We're making so much money, it doesn't really matter.

27:57We're in full employment. So this kind of idea that we need to make a big shift is there's no real, you know, background to drive that kind of thing.

28:09David McWilliams: So there's no urgency. There's no urgency. Which is when things are actually at their most dangerous in anything, in life, in business, in creativity, in every endeavor that involves innovation. And I mean that whether you're writing books or whether you're doing podcasts or whether you're running a corner shop, right? But it's that moment of comfort that is the place where you misdiagnose the highest risk. The highest risk is when everything's grand. When everything's grand. And I'd like to think, I mean, if you're listening to these characters out there, and we really should be listening to Lutnik, and we really should be listening to Draghi, you know, who is saying we must act decisively now and bold, then I'd like to think that we will actually start to make the moves while we have the money, while we have the momentum, while we have a lot of these multinationals there, before we lose even more advantages to other countries than what we have.

29:10But again, that's going to require vision. It's going to require political leadership to drive that vision through. You know, the IFSC was, I think the tagline or something similar was, the easiest place in the world to do business. It was a kind of a globalist proposition. And we could shift that and say easiest or best place in the world to innovate. As a way of trying to drive this, we should adopt the same principles that drove the success of the IFSC. There was public-private partnership. It was industry-led, entrepreneur-led, government-backed. There was a very focused specialist focus. We talked about how Macron was very focused on this one thing.

29:53The IFSC did not try and win every category within financial services. And then it had all this focused programs and incentives around it. It had infrastructure and there was incentives around that. Big, bold policy moves around that. So there was a number of different things that came into focus. You know, talents was a big part of our proposition back then, the young, educated workforce. But we have another potential opportunity is you have all this talent inside these multinationals right now. And how do we lure them out?

30:25David McWilliams: If I was a human resources manager, which is, I've always complained, I've told John, I didn't like them as a general tribe. Because you kept getting fired. Exactly, exactly, exactly. But if I were, I would think, okay, what country is the highest concentration of capital, creativity, innovation, and people at work in these areas? That's the key, right? They're at work every day. So when you're at work, you create networks. You create sales. You create innovation. You create friendships. Friendships are very important, right? What country has$150 billion sitting on deposit in its banking system doing nothing?

31:06David McWilliams: What country has total access to the European Union? Ireland. And what country has this, in effect, bridge with the United States through multinationals? Ireland. I mean, the proposition is we have everything. We just don't have the fucking urgency. and yeah we don't have the urgency and and we need to bring certain things to play i mean if you're a startup right now one of the critical things you need to lure talent away from these big jobs is to give them some equity in your startup right share options sure and the problem is is that while we have the best policies in the world if you're google for entrepreneurial policies they're way down the rankings for Ireland.

31:51And so actually that critical offer that a startup can give someone in a big tech company is actually not as attractive because it's actually really complicated to use it in the first place. And secondarily, there's not enough tax advantage.

32:06David McWilliams: So you're saying make stock options tax-free, make them incredibly attractive. Basically, if you're trying to get somebody out of Google, you can't as a small startup pay the same salary because you don't have the brass. So what you've got to do is say to the person, the individual, listen, you come on over here. We're going to give you options. If we all work together, we float and or we get some equity. You're going to make money. You can cash them in. And if you cash them in, we won't tax them. Exactly. But the majority of startups in Ireland don't use that scheme because it's A, so complicated to use.

32:39And so we're not leveraging that. Our goal should be the number one for that policy in the world. just like it was with the IFSC. We went from all the way from 50 % to 10%. It should be the same level of our economic vision to create an innovation economy needs to reflect itself in our tax cut as a starting point. So that's another example of how we can get the talent moving. Actually, with NDRC, it funded what's called a talent accelerator, where we actually go to all these people and give them a pathway, even if they don't have an idea or don't have a co-founder, they actually come in. We take 40 of them every year, put them in a room and help them form companies.

33:24So we can be very deliberate in different ways about how we get the revolving door out. And by the way, this isn't bad for multinationals. They want to be part of robust innovation ecosystems. So all of this work is actually will serve to sustain their presence and strengthen their presence as well. So which goes back to the, maybe the best thing we can do, you know, in a changing world is make it more advantageous. The other side of it as well is with AI. AI is going to have obviously a massive impact and probably a bigger impact on the more operational roles as well. Yeah, well, they're the ones that are going to go.

34:03They're the ones that are going to go. So it's important we move up the value chain. When Google first arrived in Ireland, less than 1 % of their staff were developers. Whereas if you look at HubSpot or Stripe, a much bigger proportion of them are actually doing development. So we have been making progress on it. The question is how we can unleash it even further.

34:24David McWilliams: Patrick, fantastic stuff. We're around the houses. We were Draghi. We were Lutnik. We were France. We were IFSC. We were TK Whittaker. great stuff. But the key thing is, the time is now. The time is now, for sure. And we have every advantage, every opportunity. We have the money, we have the multinationals. And actually, if we reach into our own history, we have a history of bold thinking. So all we need to do is do it again, and we will survive in this new era and thrive. Patrick, wonderful to talk to you. Thanks.

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36:32Right, Mac, so the writing's on the wall, really. We don't have the leadership. I'm sure we have the innovators, but we don't have the leadership to seed this innovation and stimulate this. Like Macron, like Patrick was talking about how Macron decided that Paris was going to be the place where... Yeah, the AI central Europe. Yeah, absolutely. And it's working. And, you know, how come he can do it and we can't? It seems to be leadership. The first thing is also the French state is set up to lead industrially. That's the way France works. So we're much more of like an Anglo-American economy, etc.

37:13But I think your point is right. Look, we are in a very perilous situation economically, right? We know that. We've talked about it. We've talked about what's happened to the housing market. We've talked about the fragility of the tax base. We've talked about what's going on in America. We've talked about the fact that corporate America is under the spell of MAGA, but it's fighting. but we're also talking about we're going into a period where there is going to be manifestly less American investment outside of America, not more. Even if Trump is going in two years' time or three or four years' time, what we are is we're in a different world, right?

37:49And what our leaders are doing, if you just isolate the economics of it, they're passing things like the Occupied Territories Bill. Now, the Occupied Territories Bill, as far as I understand it, there is an American state legislation a condition that no American company can get government contracts if it is involved in or with a country that boycotts Israel. If my reading of it is what I'm reading, this could be the case. Now, that means that no American corporation that is in Ireland, that is in receipt of government contracts, can continue operating in Ireland and be unmolested by what's going on in the United States.

38:36And you think of all those big tech companies, they all exist on government contracts, maybe not as big as Tesla, but they all have a big American government component in their revenue. So what we're doing in the Occupied Territories Act, I mean, again, you look at the morality, et cetera, that's one argument. Well, I agree with that. But I do think, look, hold on a second, right? What is the economic consequence of this performative act, this solo run, that nobody else in the European Union is doing? The economic consequences are going to be significant. If we were, for example, Germany or France, the economic consequences to a country whose tax base is large, your corporation tax is almost overwhelmingly based on American money, is going to be phenomenal.

39:28And you know what it's like going up against AIPAC, which is the Israeli lobby in America, right? So what I'm saying is we need to be very, very careful. There is a consequence for what we're doing on the Occupied Territories Bill. That consequence will be felt directly in the economy. I'm not sure our politicians have figured that out, is all I'm saying, John. And we're going to come back to this because it's inflammatory stuff. Yeah. But I would like to hear Micheál Martin and Simon Harris explain what are the long-term economic consequences of this act against a background of already a fragile local economy with the Americans pulling back, number one, and number two, with the Americans deciding you're either with us or against us.

40:24I haven't heard an answer. We may well over the course of the next few weeks. We'll talk to you on Thursday.

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