05/10/2026
The bill for Ireland's hosting of the EU Presidency has reached €75.2 million to the end of August, according to figures provided by Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers.
The Department of Justice, Home Affairs and Migration accounts for the largest spend at €26.3 million—a figure largely driven by Garda overtime—followed by the Department of Foreign Affairs at €20.3 million and the Office of Public Works at €19.6 million. An Garda Síochána has been allocated €125 million for EU Presidency duties, with Minister for Justice Jim O'Callaghan acknowledging that the role involves "significant additional overtime and related costs, additional training and equipment costs, as well as a requirement for the purchase of additional fleet and other specialist equipment."
The revised Government Estimates for 2026 have allocated €300 million to cover the costs of hosting the Presidency, which includes 22 Ministerial-level events, a meeting of the 27 EU Heads of State, and a meeting of the 47 Heads of State of the European Political Community—some 250 events in total.
For Irish taxpayers, these are substantial sums. But the financial cost is only part of the story. The deeper question—one that neither the Government nor its critics in the mainstream media seem willing to confront—is what Ireland's enthusiastic participation in the EU project actually represents.
The European Union was founded on promises of peace, freedom, prosperity and strategic autonomy. What does it stand for today? War, censorship, authoritarianism, economic stagnation, if not outright deindustrialisation, and geopolitical vassalization to Washington's diktats.
The EU is the external institutional form of an internal political transformation of European states—specifically, the retreat of governing classes from representing their own domestic constituencies, and the formation of a transnational economic constitution that locks in neo-liberal policies. EU Member-Statehood can now be seen as the form taken by the failure of representative democracy within Europe's nation-states. It institutionalises a "void" between ruling elites and ordinary citizens.
Over the past decade, the EU's institutional centre of gravity has shifted decisively towards the European Commission, which has steadily colonised policy areas once reserved for national governments—fiscal policy, public health, foreign affairs, defence. Each successive crisis—the sovereign debt crisis, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine—has served as a pretext for the Commission to assume new powers, issue "emergency" decisions and quietly lock in permanent shifts in the architecture of EU authority.
None of this has required formal treaty change. It has happened by stealth, outside the arena of public debate, through a process of "integration by stealth"—and the result has been a steady, cumulative erosion of national sovereignty and democratic accountability.
Ireland's experience illustrates this dynamic perfectly. The transformation of the Irish State has been accompanied by the hollowing out of domestic politics. Political parties have ceased to represent their traditional constituents and to offer competing political projects, becoming mere electoral machines focused on office-seeking. A yawning void has opened up where the relations of democratic representation used to be.
Irish political elites now look less to their own citizens for legitimation and policy direction than to their relations with each other, mediated through the EU and other international institutions.
The basic parameters of social, economic and political life are defined—indeed constitutionalized—in European treaties, and important policy decisions are increasingly made by bureaucrats and ministers in intergovernmental consultations, not in the Dáil or in response to domestic political contestation.
The EU Council's institutional supremacy illustrates that Irish elites have not simply "lost" power to supranational bureaucracies but instead exercise it differently. They assemble and deliberate with their peers in European institutions, setting EU policy, then return home to impose this domestically. Because EU Council meetings are held in secret, without even minutes being taken, leaders can agree policies that would be impossible to ratify domestically, presenting them as a European fait accompli that cannot be resisted.
This is the EU's notorious "democratic deficit"—and it does not lie primarily in Brussels. It lies within its Member-States. It is not a function of the weakness of the European Parliament so much as the weakness of national parliaments. Elected national leaders have transferred some power to a supranational policy maker in order to allow themselves to better withstand pressure from political forces that might demand radical change—first and foremost labour—by testifying that "this is Europe's will."
EU regulation is deeply neo-liberal in character. Yet, this is no external imposition by a runaway supranational bureaucracy. National elites often present it in that way, the better to disguise their own role in EU decision-making, but the truth is that the EU is a creature of the Member-States themselves.
EU law and regulation effectively form an "economic constitution" for Europe. This constitution specifies rules and procedures that lock in neo-liberal policies, placing them beyond the scope of domestic democratic scrutiny and contestation.
At its core lie the "four freedoms": the free movement of goods, services, capital and labour. European governments have willingly abrogated their own right to regulate these flows across their borders. They have also renounced "market-distorting" practices like State aid to industry, adopted monetary and fiscal rules that constrain State intervention in the market, and committed to sectoral packages that promote the privatisation of public services.
This process reached a turning point with the signing of the Maastricht Treaty, which effectively embedded neo-liberalism into the very fabric of the European Union—a shift that the creation of the euro then locked in once and for all, by depriving most member states of the most fundamental pillar of economic sovereignty: the power to issue their own currency. In so doing, it transformed member states into something resembling colonies of Brussels and Frankfurt. This amounted to nothing less than a constitutional and juridical coup d'état—albeit an unusually discreet one.
For Ireland, the consequences have been profound. The Celtic Tiger boom and bust, the austerity that followed, the loss of economic sovereignty during the bailout—all of this was made possible, indeed inevitable, by Ireland's membership of the eurozone. The decision to surrender monetary sovereignty was presented as a matter of national interest. In reality, it was a decision by Irish elites to lock in their preferred economic policies against popular opposition, and to avoid having to be responsive to their own domestic constituents.
The EU has not merely served as a vehicle for shifting the balance of power in favour of capital. It has been a core instrument of Europe's subordination to Washington and the transatlantic war lobby.
The EU has always been wedded to Atlanticism, an allegiance that has only intensified since the end of the Cold War. Ursula von der Leyen—dubbed "Europe's American president"—has used the Ukraine crisis to push through a further expansion of the Commission's top-down executive powers, producing a de facto supranationalization of EU foreign policy. She has done this, while ensuring the bloc's alignment with—or, more accurately, its subordination to—US-NATO strategy, and pushing to side-line dissenting voices, both at an individual and State level.
For Ireland, this has meant increasing participation in a war drive against Russia that has inflicted serious damage on European economies and risks dragging the continent into open conflict with the world's largest nuclear power. It has meant the abandonment of Ireland's traditional military neutrality, a cornerstone of Irish sovereignty since independence. And it has meant the subordination of Irish foreign policy to the strategic objectives of Washington—objectives that may bear little relation to Irish interests or values.
The major transformations in the global economy over the past decades—the development of new technologies, the spread of global value chains, the growth of trade, the rise of China—required none of the conditions of the European Single Market, let alone those of the EU itself or its single currency. On the contrary, economies outside the EU—the United States, China and the rising economies of Asia and Latin America—have achieved growing prosperity and deepening international connectivity without comparable supranational structures or monetary arrangements.
These countries increasingly favour looser arrangements, such as BRICS and ASEAN, over the EU's model of supranational integration.
Where the EU's model demands a high degree of sovereignty-sharing, binding regulation and a strong central authority to enforce laws across member states, BRICS and ASEAN allow countries to cooperate while retaining substantial control over domestic policy. Such arrangements deliver economic cooperation without mandating policy harmonisation, allowing member states to pursue their own economic models while still fostering regional growth through a more flexible, consensus-based framework—one with the added benefit of enabling cooperation between countries with markedly different political, economic and value systems.
This framework reflects an emerging preference for multipolarity and is shaping a new model of international collaboration that diverges sharply from the EU's supranational approach.
The void at the heart of the Member-State is deeply corrosive of political authority and, therefore, of national sovereignty. While EU Member-States formally retain their ultimate legal autonomy—as Britain has proved, they can leave the EU, albeit with great difficulty—national sovereignty has more to it than that.
Sovereignty has both legal and political dimensions but, at base, it is a quality of the relationship between the governors and the governed. The State's sovereignty reflects the state and character of the loyalty that citizens feel towards their institutions of self-government. Put simply, the State has authority insofar as the citizens believe it to be their State, its institutions having been authorised by them and acting on their behalf.
This is what gives the State the power to enact and enforce laws: the people are satisfied that the State is acting with their consent, making them likelier to obey the law and to feel that the State's coercive power is legitimately deployed to enforce the law. Conversely, any weakening of this relationship between the citizenry and the State weakens sovereignty. The state may retain its formal powers but, insofar as the state fails to represent the citizenry, its law-making appears arbitrary and its coercive powers authoritarian. Obedience may still be achieved, but fear plays an ever-greater role as political loyalty declines.
Insofar as European integration has insulated law and government from democratic control, weakening their representative aspect, it has eroded Member-States' domestic authority. Consequently, while the legal shell of sovereignty remains, political sovereignty has ebbed away.
As Ireland spends hundreds of millions of euro hosting EU Presidency events, as Garda overtime bills mount, as the Government prepares for summits and meetings that will produce decisions made behind closed doors and presented to the Irish people as faits accomplis, the question must be asked: what is this all for?
The answer, increasingly, is that it is for the maintenance of a system that has systematically dismantled Irish democracy, transferred economic sovereignty to unaccountable institutions, and subordinated Irish foreign policy to the strategic objectives of Washington. It is for the preservation of a neo-liberal economic constitution that locks in policies that the Irish people would never choose if they were given a genuine choice. It is for the continuation of a project that was elitist, anti-democratic and authoritarian from its inception.
Europeans who care about peace, democracy and the continent's future need to unite in opposition to the EU before it is too late. For Ireland, this means reclaiming the sovereignty that has been surrendered, rebuilding the links between citizens and their institutions, and imagining a future in which the Irish people—not Brussels bureaucrats, not transnational capital, not American strategists—decide the direction of their own society.
