Sweet pre-election struggles in Ireland: How to spend huge money from Apple?
Ahead of Friday’s general election in the Republic of Ireland, the parties vying to form a new government have vowed to spend a huge tax on Apple.
In September, the EU’s highest court ruled that the US tech firm benefited from an illegal deal with the country, ordering Ireland to pay more than €14 billion in back taxes and interest.
The major parties have promised to use the money to improve the country’s lagging infrastructure.
The cost and affordability of housing remains one of Ireland’s biggest social, economic and political issues.
The Republican Party, currently the largest political group, said it would allocate four billion euros for social and affordable housing.
Another two billion would go into a new fund whose remit would include infrastructure upgrades to open up more sites for house building.
Sinn Fein, the largest opposition party, has publicly pledged that 7.6 billion euros will go to the public housing program, if they get the chance to decide on it.
They allocated a billion euros to compensate citizens whose homes were demolished due to defective construction materials.
The Labor Party says it will use six billion euros to create a state-owned construction company. They claim that this would create “sustainable government capacity to deliver housing” and counter the “profit model”, reports the BBC.
Public transport and renewable energy sources
The Green Party would use the money to improve public transport. They said that seven billion, plus three billion euros of other one-time funds, would be used for the realization of large projects related to public transport.
The Republican Party would allocate 3.6 billion “for the improvement of transport networks”.
Other priorities of the contenders for the new convocation of the government are the water system and improving the electricity grid to cope with the production of more renewable energy.
Sinn Fein would set aside €2.5 billion for energy, including money for a new investment fund for renewables, which would allow the state to invest alongside private companies in renewable energy projects.
The party uses the example of Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, which it says has bought stakes in over 3.5 GW of renewable energy projects across Europe.
The question “How will Ireland spend the 14 billion euros that it will receive from Apple?” is not the first time it has been asked, and this topic was already discussed at the end of September, when a judgment was passed on the collection of back taxes and interest to the technology giant.
