Ireland’s treasury received bittersweet news on Monday morning as the country the EU in navigating testing diplomatic waters after the ascent of Donald Trump.
The country’s statistics office, the CSO, announced Ireland exported €72.6 billion ($76 billion) worth of goods to the U.S. in 2024, a mammoth 34% increase on the year before. With imports falling slightly, Ireland extended its goods trade surplus to €50.1 billion with the U.S. last year. Ireland’s neighbor across the Atlantic Ocean has closed the gap with the EU as Ireland’s most lucrative goods export market.
The news was inevitably something to celebrate among Ireland’s government, which has gotten used to toasting the financial windfall of its special relationship with the States. The country recently reluctantly accepted a €13 billion ($13.6 billion) backdated tax payment from Apple imposed by the EU.
“This performance is testament to the strength of exporting companies in Ireland and to their efforts in growing business, reaching new markets, and delivering this record performance,” said Peter Burke, Ireland’s minister for enterprise, tourism, and employment.
Yet within the strong export data is a reminder of Ireland’s increasingly complicated relationship with the U.S.
The country’s oldest stockbroker, Goodbody, compared the risks from Trump 2.0 to those faced by the U.K. in the wake of the shock Brexit vote in 2016. That’s a result of Ireland’s status as America’s “51st State” from an economic perspective, according to Goodbody.
In addition to the oft-cited tech sector, a big source of that mantle is Ireland’s pharmaceutical sector, which is awash with U.S. multinationals.
Eli Lilly, Pfizer, and Johnson & Johnson are among the companies that have set up operations in Ireland, where it exports products back to the U.S.
Ireland’s pharmaceutical might is partly a result of its low corporation tax rate, which at 12.5% helped it entice U.S. firms to expand their operations overseas. Network effects over time and infrastructure investment have helped solidify the country as a key hub for multinationals.
Eli Lilly’s launch of GLP-1 weight loss medication Zepbound, which it produces from a Cork site, could well explain much of the drastic €18.6 billion ($19.4 billion) increase in Irish goods exports to the States last year.
The pharma giant has pledged to continue to continue its investment in the country. In September, prior to Trump’s election victory, Eli Lilly announced a $1.8 billion investment in Ireland to expand its production of Alzheimer's, diabetes, and obesity medications.
The threat from the U.S.
The growing presence of U.S. companies overseas has frustrated some lawmakers in the U.S.
In 2023, Brad Setser, who works as a researcher for the US Council on Foreign Relations, told Congress: "There is no plausible explanation for the current scale of U.S. imports of pharmaceuticals from Belgium, Ireland, Switzerland, and Singapore that isn't tied to tax avoidance."
Such sentiments won’t be lost on President Trump, who has threatened to implement wide-ranging import tariffs on goods coming from Europe.
Earlier in February, KPMG warned that Trump’s proposed tariffs could affect one-third of all Irish goods exports, though it added these tariffs would likely hurt the U.S. more. Edgar Morgenroth, a professor of economics at Dublin City University, agrees.
"Ireland is far more exposed to a trade war with the US than any other EU country. Much of that exposure affects US multinationals with operations in Ireland," Morgenroth told Fortune. "US tariffs on EU goods will hurt the US consumers and targeted but very limited retaliation could have very serious negative consequences for the US economy—the EU is not Mexico."
Trump also effectively pulled the U.S. out of a global deal that would fix corporate taxes at a floor of 15%, giving the U.S. scope to compete with Ireland’s low rates of tax.
Daragh McGreal, head of strategic economics at KPMG Ireland, doesn’t expect multinationals to make a knee-jerk reaction to a change of management in the Oval Office and subsequent taxation changes.
“Ireland remains an appealing choice for investors, and multinational businesses already here are unlikely to move back to the U.S.,” said Daragh McGreal, head of strategic economics at KPMG Ireland. “Many multinationals may see corporation tax changes as a part of a four-year cycle, rather than as a fundamental long-term shift in US tax policy.”
Ireland’s blockbuster export growth is a reminder of the country’s success in enticing foreign investors to its shores. It will rely on the headway it has made in retaining those companies to outweigh a barrage of economic pain set to come from the Trump administration.
