This blogpost is authored by Federico Antonelli, CERRE Project Officer.
Today, Dublin takes the EU Council presidency. It will oversee a legislative agenda that, on the one hand, seeks to simplify regulation. But, on the other hand, the agenda will also impose significant new responsibilities on large tech platforms—on algorithmic transparency, content moderation, market contestability, and data practices. It will also further European sovereignty initiatives designed to reduce reliance on US technology providers.
For Ireland, the tension between these two policy directions is particularly sharp. Ireland is in many ways the EU’s tech capital. Its tech sector accounts for a disproportionate share of its corporate tax revenue and employment. It hosts the European headquarters of most of the world’s largest digital firms. It therefore faces a difficult balancing act between delivering competitiveness, protecting Europe’s values, and furthering economic security – and acting as a neutral arbiter in debates where it has a particularly big stake.
Competitiveness and regulation
Mario Draghi’s diagnosis was blunt: Europe’s productivity gap with the US is real, and it is widening. Draghi points to overregulation as an important constraint on growth. Ireland will likely feel stronger pressure to read this as a call for deregulation, given the strong presence of large multinational tech firms in Dublin. But what Europe needs is not lower standards, but clearer and simpler rules – and rules that foster competition rather than helping the largest firms maintain competitive moats. As CERRE has recently explained, legislative and institutional reforms could help improve the transparency and predictability of how the EU’s laws are enforced – without lowering regulatory standards.
A stable and predictable regulatory framework that allows firms to invest with confidence – and which imposes proportionate regulation, with fewer requirements on small young firms – is a competitive advantage, not a drag. The real test is whether Europe can build rules that are simultaneously protective and enabling: that diffuse innovation to SMEs without sacrificing fundamental safeguards.
Online safety and EU values
One of the most important safeguards is a commitment to protect children and keep people safe online. As CERRE’s analysis of transatlantic cooperation on protecting minors online demonstrates, this is not a uniquely European concern — and the EU seems increasingly likely to take inspiration from other jurisdictions such as Australia and the UK.
For Ireland, this creates an immediate dilemma. Tightening rules on children’s access to social media, and rules which require reforms to algorithmic design, will reshape many firms’ business models. Dublin will have to decide how to champion a balanced approach, which balances online safety with other interests like freedom of expression, and reflects technical feasibility. Without credible enforcement on children’s safety, neither European citizens nor regulators will accept a digitally open economy. Dublin’s task is to defend this alignment between protection and openness.
Security and sovereignty
European digital sovereignty is increasingly a geopolitical project, not simply an industrial policy one. The European Commission’s Tech Sovereignty Package represents a deliberate, but tentative, choice to reduce reliance on non-European technology providers and build European capacity in critical sectors such as cloud computing infrastructure and chips. This represents a significant shift in the EU’s approach and provokes significant differences of opinion between member-states. As our analysis on CERRE’s paper on European preference shows, the EU’s shift entails both opportunities and risks – and the Irish Presidency faces the task of brokering compromises between member-states who take very different views on the right balance to strike.
Conclusion
Ireland’s presidency will be judged not by legislative ambition, but by whether it can broker pragmatic compromises that seek the right balance between openness, protecting European values, and nurturing the EU’s own tech sector for both competitiveness and resilience.
Ireland last held the presidency in 2013. It was regarded as an honest broker—neutral, and capable of building consensus across diverse interests, including on sensitive issues like agricultural policy reform. The current presidency faces an even harder test, because the trade-offs are more concrete and the costs more visible. The economic stakes are higher, the global context more volatile, and Ireland’s exposure more acute.
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