Apple Tax funds: railways, defective concrete blocks in Ireland's North and West
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock.
Ireland has recently been told we have to accept and spend the long disputed EUR 14 billion of tax on the Apple computer business.
We are now approaching a general election where the political parties are likely to make promises about how they spend the money.
This is one good reason for having the election three months early: Ireland can have a public debate about the money before the government starts to sign contracts and write cheques. The new government, whoever it is, will hopefully have both a mandate and the competence to use the money wisely.
Apple may be one of Ireland's biggest tax payers but they don't get a vote as a company. Employees who are Irish citizens will be able to vote. Nonetheless, Apple is giving us giant hints that nobody has commented on publicly so far.
We can use OpenStreetmap to look at the location of Apple's headquarters in California and we can see two things very quickly.
The first are the railways. Railway lines are a big issue throughout Ireland. In many cases, the railways are already there but they are poorly maintained and they haven't been used for years. The railway that passes on the north side of Apple is the Caltrain peninsula line.
Hopefully the new government will see this as some kind of an omen and use some Apple money for rail infrastructure projects.
On the south side of Apple's HQ is the Vasona Industrial Lead and look where it goes, the local cement quarry. Of course, this is the other big issue in the North and West of Ireland but it is also an issue for Ireland as a whole. There are thousands of families in counties Donegal, Mayo and to a lesser extent in other regions who have suffered from the use of defective concrete in their homes. Many of the homes need to be totally rebuilt. It is a scandal that has been going on for years. There is a risk of fatal accidents and suicides by stressed homeowners. On top of that, people regularly ask why there are so few financial companies offering products like insurance and mortgages in the Irish republic. The unusual and uncertain nature of defective houses may deter more financial companies from offering services to Ireland as a whole.
The poor regulation of concrete production in Ireland reminds me of JuristGate, the crisis in the legal insurance industry in Switzerland. People seemed to know that something was wrong with the product for many years before the consumers found out they had been sold a lemon.
The City of Cupertino provides an interactive web site where we can see the real time impact of quarry dust on local residents like Apple, their employees and families.
News reports describe over 2,100 code violations, $12.7 million in penalties paid by quarry operators and complaints by the local community. Yet none of them refer to the supply of defective concrete blocks. The concrete produced there was of the highest standard, among other things, they supplied all the US military facilities throughout the entire Pacific region in WW2.
Here is the map of the region. Is there a hidden message in it that Apple tax revenues should be spent on trains and 100 percent redress for defective concrete?
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