Or is nothing Ireland does binding, until someone else with real power has counter-signed it?
Whatever ideas you have about the state needing to have the highest authority in the land, if we follow that through by not holding them accountable for agreements made, then that actually substantially dilutes the power the state can have.
If you sign a deal with Nevada to sell products in the entirety of the United States, you expect federal laws to apply, don't you? Well, EU is not a federation like the Unites States, but it's half-way there. You cannot ignore Bruxelles when dealing with the Single Market, just like you cannot ignore federal laws when doing interstate commerce in the US.
I have found that EU is really something hard to grasp for non-European. And to be fair, for most Europeans too. If Ireland wants its sovereignty back it can exit the EU (and the Single Market) at any time. But then of course it won't be the gateway to the Single Market for American companies anymore...
> hard to grasp for non-European. And to be fair, for most Europeans too
Yes, I think the degree to which this thing is a super-state (or at least claims to be one) not a trade club is not fully appreciated. Not least by the voters in whose name it was created. It's in some gray area between a federal state and a treaty, and cases like this are illuminating as to precisely what shade of gray.
About the EU, "The European Union is a unique economic and political union between 27 EU countries" [1] Who believes it's just a trade club? I'm born in France, grew up in France, and never thought of the EU as just a free trade zone. It's a weird belief to me, and obviously not one anchored in any kind of reality. But that might simply be because it hasn't been sold that way to French citizens, maybe Irish people were told otherwise?
But forget about the EU. When Apple setup its European headquarter in Ireland, it's to sell its goods in all of Europe, what we call the Single Market. The Single Market is not the EU. Apple could have set up its European headquarter in Iceland or Norway, countries that are outside of the EU, yet inside the Single Market. And the same European laws would still apply. These laws are not the rules of the EU, they are the rules of the trade club.
When you enter a member of the Single Market specifically with the purpose of selling to all the members of the club, you can't play dumb and claim you didn't know that the rules of the clubs applied to you.
If Ireland wants to leave the Single Market, it can do so freely. It could even leave the EU without leaving the Single Market if it so wishes, but the rules of the Single Market would then still apply. Trying to stay within the Single Market while ditching its rules is, as demonstrated very thoroughly by the UK, completely impossible.
[1] https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/eu-in-brief_en#fro...
When joining the EU, Ireland promised to have (tax) policies consistent with certain principles. The 'side-deal' with Apple alleged (according to the EU) broke those principles.
If Ireland doesn't want a higher authority looking over them they can leave the EU. This is one of the arguments made by the Leave side in UK Brexit: we don't want Brussels breathing down our necks.
Ireland signed on to the EU and several trade agreements before that. Until it quits these it is subject to their rules.
> If you negotiate a deal with the highest authority in Ireland, and they sign off on it, are you done?
Any contract you sign in any country can be invalidated by a court.
Sure. If your employment contract prevents you from taking other work, you may be fired if you break this. You may also have signed up to binding arbitration by some weird court. But normally the 3rd party (your weekend employer, who did not sign) cannot be penalized.
That's what points out how much sovereignty has been given up by Ireland. It has signed up something much more than a trade deal. A foreign court can not just strike down laws it passes, but re-write them retrospectively a decade after the fact.
No law has been sturck down. No law has been rewritten. No law has been applied retroactively.
A deal was found to be illegal, based on the laws at the time, so was anulled (as any illegal deal would be).
This was appealed, and the court found that the facts of the case had been misinterperated (ie they're arguing about what counts as state aid, not whether state aid is illegal).
And not just Ireland's.
And that's what I'm saying. If your legal system is united to this degree into a larger framework, then that new thing is the locus of sovereignty. It is much more than a trade deal. (That doesn't mean it's wrong, or a good idea or a bad idea. But it's a big change.)
What you're advocating for is despotism.
And I think cases like this €13bn tax bill are half way there. Did it really spend 12 years working its way through neutral courts, like some slow squabble over who inherits the family pizza parlor? Or was there a bit more political input now that the EU feels that US tech giants are a geopolitical threat, in a way that they didn't 12 years ago?
And so the sovereignty question is not just on whose soil the high court sits, and who writes the nice rules it officially follows. It's about who gets to decide which big cases to let slide, and which to go after.