AI, Work, Who Gains in Ireland

Let’s talk about who actually builds artificial intelligence. It is built on the work of millions of people, & the gains are concentrating in the few firms that own the models.

In Sandyford this spring, 720 people who did Meta’s content moderation & AI training were told the work was going. More than five hundred of them had been training the systems that replace them. They were employed by Covalen, a Dublin contractor, so the decision to automate was Meta’s & the legal obligations were somebody else’s. They went on strike three times in May. By July the redundancies had gone through &, by their own union’s account, many of them were paid nothing.

This has not stopped. About three hundred people at TikTok in Ireland lost their jobs in August, from trust & safety, the part of the platform that decides what you see & what comes down. Their termination agreements are reported to ask two further things: no complaint to the Data Protection Commission about how their personal data was handled, & no data access request about their own dismissal. In May, Meta moved to cut up to 350 more Irish roles, & told staff by email in the early hours. In April, Oracle gave the Department notice of around 150 redundancies among its Irish staff.

So who is willing to say the machine did it? Almost nobody. Meta came closest. On its January earnings call Mark Zuckerberg said that projects which used to require big teams were now being accomplished by a single very talented person. Sam Altman told an interviewer in February that there is some AI washing, firms blaming AI for layoffs they would have made anyway, & in the same breath that there is real displacement too. This paper does not need that settled.

The State’s own economists model roughly 7% of jobs displaced, close to 200,000, & inequality rising in every scenario they run. The losses fall on wages. The gains land as capital. The State owns the grid the machines run on, it operates two sovereign funds, it writes the labour law, & it has held the chair of the EU Council since 1 July. Who carries the loss & who keeps the gain is being decided mostly by default.

Loss and Gain

So what does the law actually guarantee you when the job goes?

Statutory redundancy needs 104 weeks of continuous service. Below that you get nothing. Above it you get two weeks a year plus a week, & the cap is €600 a week, which has not moved since January 2005. The law does say how it should move. When the Minister raises it, the Redundancy Payments Act 1979 tells him to take into account any changes in the average earnings of workers in the transportable goods industries. That is a CSO series, & the CSO stopped publishing it in 2007. Asked about the cap in September 2024, the Minister restated that benchmark as the live one, accepted the cap had not risen since 2005, & said officials were keeping the matter under active review. Nothing obliges him to move it at all. Connect trade union puts the indexed figure at €1,015.

Meta’s own Dublin staff went three weeks after the annotators, on reported terms of sixteen weeks plus two a year that Meta has never confirmed for Irish workers. Amazon’s Irish package in March was five weeks a year, floored at twelve & capped at seventy-five. The statute sets the same floor for all three. Everything above it was a choice.

The duty to talk before any of that happens has the same problem, & it is two words wide. Section 10A of the Protection of Employment Act 1977 applies the collective redundancy duties whether the decision is taken by the employer or by an undertaking which controls it. It reaches up a corporate chain. It does not reach across a commercial one. Meta was Covalen’s client & not its controlling undertaking, so the law’s reach ended exactly where the decision was made. Covalen notified the Department on 27 April with 720 roles at risk. It declined to attend the Workplace Relations Commission, & it was entitled not to, because conciliation there is voluntary & nobody can be compelled to appear. It was raised in the Dáil.

So how much more of this is coming? Nobody knows, & the number everyone quotes is doing less work than it looks. That 7% is imported from a Goldman Sachs estimate of United States employment, which the ESRI’s own authors treat as a possible upper bound, & the model contains no job creation at all. What the report does find, & it cuts against the usual story, is that the risk sits with higher earning & highly educated workers: 0.7% of the bottom income decile displaced against 5.1% of the top. A wave that reaches into salaried professional work is a harder problem, & it puts more people on the same side of it.

The Departments of Finance & of Enterprise classify 63% of Irish employment as highly exposed, & split that into a third where AI is likely to complement labour & 30% where it may substitute for it. Women hold far more of the exposed work, 76% of female employment against 51% of male. That is about who is exposed, not who has already lost. The CSO counts rather than attributes, & its quarterly figures moved in opposite directions three months apart, so do not rest this argument on the displacement count.

Adoption is still shallow; only 20.2% of Irish enterprises used AI in some capacity in 2025. The aggregate looks fine, with IDA client employment at 312,468, up 1.5% on the year. And most employers are not naming AI as the reason. If AI is only the cover story, does anything here change? No. A right to see the algorithm, terms on the power it runs on, & a floor under the people it displaces are worth having either way.

Worker Voice

Software now sorts who gets hired, sets who works when, & scores how well they did it. A person still signs the dismissal, which is exactly the gap. The Commission’s Joint Research Centre surveyed more than 70,000 workers across all 27 member states. Three in ten use AI for work. One in four has their working time allocated automatically by software. In a Eurobarometer of the Irish public, 80% said it mattered that workers & their representatives be involved in adopting workplace technology. They are not involved, & nothing obliges anyone to involve them.

Two countries show the obligation. Spain’s Rider Law has since 2021 given workers’ representatives the right to the parameters, rules & instructions of algorithms bearing on working conditions, hiring & dismissal. It sits in the general labour code, so it covers every employer & not only the delivery platforms that named it. Germany’s works councils have held co-determination over monitoring systems since long before AI, & the 2021 reform confirmed those rights reach it. Neither is a magic wand. Spain’s right works only where workers have elected representatives, & enforcement has been thin, with many councils unaware they hold it. Germany’s consent over hiring runs only to selection guidelines, & only firms above 500 employees can be made to draw them up.

The Union already wrote the duty, in Article 26(7) of the AI Act. Before putting into service or using a high-risk AI system at the workplace, an employer must inform workers’ representatives & the affected workers that they will be subject to it. The second limb carries the weight, because putting into service means supply for first use, & most employers run a system somebody else built. It does not depend on union recognition, which matters in a country with no recognition right, where collective agreements cover about a third of workers.

Then in June the co-legislators deferred it. Regulation (EU) 2026/1744 came into force on 27 July & fixed the employment obligations at 2 December 2027, on hard dates rather than conditional ones.

We have already named our enforcers. The Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Act 2026 was signed on 21 July & set up the AI Office of Ireland as the coordinating authority, & a statutory instrument sealed on 31 July, made under the European Communities Act rather than the new one, designates the Workplace Relations Commission as the market surveillance authority for employment. We appointed the Commission sixteen months before the duty it enforces bites, & the Act is enforcement machinery only: it writes no right for workers that the Regulation does not already give them.

Three duties bind in the meantime. Since 2 August the transparency duties of Article 50, which the omnibus left on their date, require a deployer to tell people when an emotion-recognition or biometric-categorisation system is used on them & to label a deepfake. The literacy duty of Article 4 has bound deployers since February 2025, softened by the same omnibus in July to a duty to support AI literacy rather than to ensure it. One prohibition stands, no inferring emotions at work, outside education. None of the three is a collective right.

So why legislate what Brussels has already written? Because Brussels wrote it, deferred it, & left the door open on purpose. Article 2(11) of the AI Act preserves member states’ freedom to be more favourable to workers on employers’ use of AI. Article 88 of the GDPR does the same work & is the sturdier hook, since member states may set employment rules by law or by collective agreement, with safeguards that name monitoring at the workplace. A right drafted as a duty on the employer as deployer, rather than a rule on the people who build the systems, needs no EU file at all.

A Stake in the Machine

Data centres took 23% of our metered electricity in 2025, some 7,663 gigawatt hours, & their consumption grew 10% in a year while every other user grew 2%. The regulator projects them at 31% of national demand by 2034. We own the grid they draw on.

Now put a person beside the power. The Government’s own commissioned report counts data centre operations as supporting 8,534 jobs in 2025, of which 39%, or 3,338, are directly employed. Set that against the electricity & you get about 2,296 megawatt hours a year for every person directly employed to operate an Irish data centre. That is not a ratio anyone should legislate against, because capital-intensive infrastructure is capital-intensive. But when the jobs number is the argument for the connection, the jobs number has to be small enough to say out loud.

Then read how that report was made. KPMG’s The Value of Data Centres to Ireland was published by the Minister on 2 June. Its headline is that some 876,000 jobs are enabled by data centres, which is total employment in the six sectors most dependent on them rather than employment attributable to them. In August, records released under freedom of information showed a Department official telling KPMG that the executive summary needed a strong narrative supporting the position that we should continue to further develop our data centre landscape. A section on the opportunity costs did not survive into the final text. The Department denies predetermining anything.

What do we charge a data centre for the electricity it takes, over what any other business pays? Nothing. The same euro per megawatt hour applies to a data hall & to a bakery.

Grid access itself is not a bargaining chip, & the argument that we should trade it for equity has to go. European electricity law requires connection on published terms applied without discrimination between system users, with refusal permitted only on capacity, safety or technical grounds. A share register is not one of them, & trading access for a stake would destroy the market-operator basis a State fund needs to invest at all.

What we can bargain with is everything else we supply: land, planning, transmission reinforcement, & being the counterparty that buys. We have done it already. The December 2025 conditions require every data centre connecting at or above a megavolt-ampere to source 80% of annual demand from additional renewable generation in the State within six years of energisation. That is a structural condition on a connection, lawful & in force, & environmental groups have challenged it in the High Court since March on the ground that it is too weak. The argument is now about how hard the conditions bite, not whether they may exist. There is one we agreed to & never enacted: Article 26(6) of the recast Energy Efficiency Directive requires data centres above a megawatt to use their waste heat unless they can show it is not technically or economically feasible, & our deadline to have that in law was 11 October 2025.

The Oireachtas has already asked for more than terms. Its Joint Committee on Artificial Intelligence recommended in December 2025 that the State should explore publicly owned AI resources & technologies, &, immediately above it, that the State act to mitigate against an overreliance on the private sector. No government has answered it.

We can still take a share, & not for the connection. For everything around it: the land, the planning consent, the transmission reinforcement we pay for, & the State standing as the counterparty that buys. Those we supply at our own discretion, & what is supplied at discretion can carry a price. The Ireland Strategic Investment Fund already holds the mandate, to invest on a commercial basis in support of economic activity & employment in Ireland, so a stake taken on the terms a private co-investor would get needs no new vehicle & no exception from anybody. The public would hold a share of the return as well as the tax. That is a stake in the machine, bought with what the State already holds.

The objection stands & is worth stating plainly: the sheds earn a landlord’s return while the models earn the rent, so this is a claim on the least valuable part of the business. It is also the only part built here, on ground we control, & a claim we can actually take beats one we cannot.

The savings fund is a different instrument on a different timescale, & it should be designed Norway’s way. Norway’s fund invests entirely outside Norway, by mandate since 1996, so the windfall is not recycled into the economy that produced it. We already own the instrument that rule describes. The Future Ireland Fund held €12.7 billion at the end of 2025 under a global mandate with no domestic investment mandate, locked until 2041. What it lacks is scale, & an answer to one question. Whom does it pay?

The Tax Base

Corporation tax comes from a small number of foreign multinationals. The Fiscal Council, the State’s own budget watchdog, estimates that the top three corporate groups paid 46% of it in 2024, roughly €13 billion, & warns that as receipts concentrate they become more risky. Several of those firms are now betting their futures on AI. If the bets disappoint, the State loses tax on wages & on profits at once.

We do not tax capital lightly. Capital gains, inheritances & deposit interest are all taxed at 33%, & fund exits at 38%, cut from 41% in Budget 2026. What we do not tax at all is accumulated net wealth. The comparison the ESRI prints is the useful one: income tax was 34% of tax revenue, corporation tax 32%, consumption 29%, & taxes on wealth & capital 5%. The joint ESRI & Department of Finance work finds that AI shifts income from labour to capital, from the base the State taxes most to the base it taxes least, & says broadening the tax base & strengthening the taxation of wealth & capital may become necessary.

Be modest about what a wealth tax reaches. The Gini rises mainly because job losses & wage gains pull the distribution apart, & the capital income channel is the smallest of the three. A resident net wealth tax cannot touch foreign-owned profits booked here for non-resident shareholders, which is a different animal from the concentration above.

Access to Work

The entry rung is where this is visible now. Stanford’s tracking, revised on 12 August, finds employment of 22 to 25 year olds in the most exposed occupations running about 19% behind their peers of the same age in less exposed work. Read the mechanism before the remedy. The authors’ first stated finding is that there is no evidence of widespread economy-wide displacement, & the gap is opening through reduced hiring rather than increased separations. A door that never opens is harder to see than one that closes. The National Youth Council’s citizens’ juries put stronger protection of entry-level work among their recommendations in June.

Retraining alone will not carry it. A Brookings commentary reviewing sixty years of American retraining found the effect on displaced workers inconclusive at best. That is American evidence, so treat it as a reason to evaluate an Irish scheme rather than to assume one works.

Under the reinforced EU Youth Guarantee we already undertake to offer everyone under 30 a job, apprenticeship, traineeship or education place within four months. Make it real, & cost it out loud. Austria’s Marienthal pilot enrolled 107 people from 2020 to 2024 & all but eliminated long-term unemployment in one town without displacing other work, & the government has since put €50 million towards extending it. Marienthal aimed at people out of work for twelve months or more, not at graduates facing a hiring freeze, so an Irish evaluation would have to test that. We had 38,900 people in long-term unemployment in the second quarter of 2026, up 7,200 in a year. An Irish version would cost a Budget line in the low hundreds of millions, & the pilot’s own per-participant figures do not transfer, because Austria’s benefit system sits inside them.

The money is already collected. The National Training Fund held a surplus of almost €1.8 billion at the end of 2024, raised from a levy employers already pay & unspent behind a spending ceiling we set ourselves. It cannot lawfully pay wages. Section 7 confines it to raising the skills of those in employment, training those who wish to acquire skills, & information on skills needs. The Oireachtas amended that section in January 2026 to let the Fund buy land & buildings, & still did not let it pay a wage.

The Presidency

We have held the Presidency of the Council of the European Union since 1 July, & we hold it until 31 December. Two files matter, & only one of them is still live.

The AI half of the November 2025 omnibus is finished. Parliament adopted it in June, the Council gave final approval on 29 June, & it entered into force on 27 July, only the last of those inside our own six months. The data half is not. As of Parliament’s own August update there is no Council general approach & no Parliament mandate, only a draft report carrying more than 1,750 amendments. The Cypriot presidency pulled the file from Coreper on 26 June & handed it to us, saying further technical work was needed. Our first compromise text, dated 3 September, was listed for the Council’s simplification subgroup on 11 September. It is an opening, not a mandate. A coalition of 133 civil society organisations & trade unions calls that package the biggest rollback of digital rights in EU history. We are not holding a line in a negotiation already running. We decide whether a Council position exists at all.

The file that fits exactly is the one nobody is discussing. The Commission’s Quality Jobs Act consultation, second phase, opened on 20 July & runs to 28 September, wholly inside our chair. It names algorithmic management & artificial intelligence at work as a target area: making automated decisions more transparent & human-centred, & protecting employees from excessive monitoring. Our published Presidency programme mentions algorithmic management & platform work nowhere. What is the chair for, if not this?

The Levers

The Minister for Enterprise can do the first three before Christmas without asking anyone for money.

Give workers’ representatives a collective right over the algorithms that hire, roster & score them, carried in the Standard Rules of the Information and Consultation Act 2006 & in the transposition of the Platform Work Directive, which is due in Irish law by 2 December 2026 anyway. Be honest about the size of it. Power concedes this one most easily, transparency is what a system offers when it means to change nothing else, & a right to be consulted is not a right to refuse. Take it, then take the rest.

Fix the reach of redundancy law. It climbs a corporate chain & stops, so the client who ended the work walks. Extend it across the commercial chain, shorten the 104 week rule, index the €600 cap to a series that still exists, & make the principal jointly liable in outsourced work.

Set up a Joint Labour Committee for outsourced moderation & annotation. The Employment Regulation Order it produces binds every employer in that sector from the day it is signed, whether or not anybody is ever recognised. Early Years went from establishment order to binding rates in a little over a year. The Labour Court’s own review records most committees as idle because employers do not attend, so this is a route around recognition that still needs somebody to sit down.

The chair is ours until 31 December, & one of these has a closing date. The Commission’s Quality Jobs Act consultation names algorithmic management & closes on 28 September. Take that limb into the Council’s work now, rather than waiting for the proposal later this year & answering it.

The rest is a Finance Bill, & the Budget is on 6 October.

Price the connection. Put a charge on data centre reserved capacity in the Finance Bill rather than adding it to a network tariff, so it sits outside the electricity duty altogether. Ten euro per megawatt hour on data centre consumption would raise about €77 million gross, nearer €67 million once deducted against profits, & a capacity charge would be set in euro per kilovolt-ampere & sized differently again. Either way it prices congestion, & it is not a transition fund. Keep the December 2025 renewable conditions & tighten them rather than replacing them.

Then the capital taxes we already have. Our own Commission on Taxation & Welfare looked at a net wealth tax in 2022 & recommended raising the yield of the existing capital taxes instead. That is broadly the same money, it is already on a State body’s record, & nobody can call it bait for capital flight. Do that first. Then publish the wealth tax case with the evidence against it attached, because that evidence is real: when Spain reintroduced its regional tax with Madrid exempt, the income tax lost to people moving was six times the direct wealth tax lost. Design blunts it, through an exit charge, a minimum residence period & valuation rules for unlisted holdings.

Then the funds. Take the stake through the Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, which already invests here on commercial terms, & define the citizen’s share in advance in the Act that governs the Future Ireland Fund. This is the only ask here with no clock on it, which is the argument for writing it now rather than later. Norway found oil in 1969 & moved the first krone into its fund in 1996. The worst week to design a claim on capital is the week you find you hold none.

One belongs to a different department. Fund the Youth Guarantee expansion from the training levy already collected, & amend section 7 of the National Training Fund Act so the Fund can pay a wage.

My late father often said to me, “that’s great David, but what are you going to do about it?” What can we do? What do we still hold?

The reported TikTok terms asked employees to sign away any complaint about how their own data was handled & any request to see the record of their own dismissal, in exchange for a payment above the statutory floor. We have our individual rights, but we do not hold a collective right to steer the systems that control our futures. No general duty of that kind reaches an Irish workplace before December 2027. In July the Oireachtas passed the Regulation of Artificial Intelligence Act & wrote no such right into it. It still can. Budget 2027 is on 6 October.

We own the grid. We fund the research. We write the labour law. So let’s get to it.