Fintan O’Toole: Murky links between your iPhone, our tax take and companies drilling in Carlow

Everything is connected. The genius of globalised capitalism is to make us forget this.

Here are two facts, linked in ways that illuminate Ireland’s uncomfortable position in the contemporary global economy. As it happens, I came across both almost simultaneously on Sunday morning.

Firstly, I was reading on The Irish Times website a piece by the always acute Eoin Burke-Kennedy. He has ferreted out from the latest economic statistics the good news that Ireland’s corporation tax receipts will be at least €2 billion higher than the already astronomical official projections.

To put that in context, the Government’s emergency cost-of-living support package last autumn cost €2 billion. A little unexpected blip has just paid for it.

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But where does this magic €2 billion come from? Largely from an increase in sales of Apple’s iPhones.

Of course, iPhones are not made in Ireland. They’re made in China.

Why do we get the revenue from the tax Apple pays on its profits from a product made in China by an American corporation? Because, in the arcane word of corporate accounting, these iPhones are a creation of “contract manufacturing”.

They’re made in China by a company that is contracted by Apple Operations International. Its home address is Hollyhill Industrial Estate, located on the edge of Cork city, between St Vincent’s GAA club and Nash’s Boreen. That’s where the magic happens.

The second fact I discovered on Sunday morning arose from a conversation I was conducting with the brilliant journalist and historian Misha Glenny at the Borris festival in Carlow. It was about the worldwide struggle to control the minerals that are crucial to the decarbonisation of the global economy and the continued development of technologies such as iPhones.

Glenny was giving a masterclass in connectivity – the relationship between geopolitics (including Russia’s determination to possess the mineral wealth of eastern Ukraine) and the stuff that lies beneath our feet. His BBC Radio 4 podcast The Scramble for Rare Earths is essential listening.

I am writing this on a MacBook made in China with minerals from God knows where. I will undoubtedly find myself writing on this same machine about how the Government should be spending the billions of euro it extracts as its cut from Apple’s profits

One of these minerals that even people as ignorant as myself know about is lithium, without which the lithium-ion batteries that power those iPhones cannot function. As Glenny was explaining this, the audience was deeply engaged with what is going on “out there” – the power struggles and environmental hazards behind the stuff we carry in our pockets.

When I asked for questions a woman in the audience spoke eloquently about the fact that a Chinese company (along with several others) is currently prospecting for lithium in the Blackstairs mountains – the very hills that shape the near horizon from Borris. It was one of those moments when the illusion of distance falls away and “out there” suddenly becomes “right here”.

It is indeed the case that Blackstairs Lithium Company has been drilling holes along the Carlow-Wicklow border for nearly a decade now. It is operating under licence from the Department of the Environment.

And it is indeed at least in part Chinese. BLC is a subsidiary of International Lithium, which is based in Canada, and Ganfeng Lithium of China, the world’s largest producer of this critical mineral. This consortium has estimated that the Aclare deposit in east Carlow has 570,000 tonnes of lithium oxide.

When the woman in the audience injected these very local facts into the global discussion, there was an almost tangible frisson. Do we really want the environmentally dirty business of violent extraction on our own doorsteps?

Most people don’t, and in all honesty I wouldn’t either. But how do we feel about all that cash that is flooding the exchequer from the iPhone production in China that uses all of these minerals? And if we put our hands on our hearts, don’t our cell phones, containing all the same stuff, get in the way?

Coincidentally, on Monday morning, Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Ireland, which manages the collection and recycling of products that contain all these minerals, published its annual report. It brought in more than 40,000 tonnes of such waste last year alone – an average of 10kg from every one of us.

The amount is staggering: nearly 20 million appliances went into Irish recycling depots last year. This is a good thing – except that they will mostly be replaced with machines that are more sophisticated and will use even more of the vital minerals.

This is all fine, so long as the dirty work is being done in the lithium mines of Chile or China. But it’s not fine when the Chinese come looking for the stuff in our green and pleasant land.

I am writing this on a MacBook made in China with minerals from God knows where. I will undoubtedly find myself writing on this same machine about how the Government should be spending the billions of euro it extracts as its cut from Apple’s profits.

And I’d be horrified if the Chinese start smashing up the Wicklow hills to get at the stuff that makes my work and my opinions possible. I would be much happier for the processes that I draw on every day to remain out of sight and out of mind.

Everything is connected – until the far end of the thread twists back around and gets too close for comfort.