America’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity. The idiot wind now howling through the United States is also blowing a potentially transformative windfall across the Atlantic. Instead of wringing our hands about the danger to our pharmaceutical exports from Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs, we should be doing something truly bold: stealing American scientists.
To grasp the nature of this opportunity, consider two realities. One is that Ireland has an unsustainable reliance on intellectual capital we do not own or create. Much of our economy is driven by medical and biological research carried out in labs in the US. The other is that Trump and his chainsaw massacre sidekick Elon Musk are deliberately wrecking the scientific ecosystem that makes this research possible.
On our side of the Atlantic, we have a bad case of drug dependency. Close to half of all our exports are medical and pharmaceutical products. Last year, they amounted to almost exactly €100 billion. We are the largest net exporter of pharmaceuticals in the European Union and one of the largest in the world. And we reap a rich harvest in well-paid jobs and corporation tax revenues.
But very little of this stuff is developed in Ireland. The American pharma giants (Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Abbott, Johnson & Johnson and so on) transfer their intellectual property – patents, copyrights and licences – to their Irish branches so they can declare massive profits here and pay tax on them at generous Irish rates. And they then export the drugs they make here back to the US.
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Even a single American medical product can have a huge bearing on Ireland’s economic performance. One weight-loss drug alone, Eli Lilly’s Zepbound, which is manufactured in Kinsale, could account for a chunk of the spectacular €18.6 billion increase in Irish exports to the US last year.
Yet consider the contrast between Zepbound and its rival in the anti-obesity market, Wegovy. The latter was developed in a country roughly the same size as Ireland: Denmark. It’s produced by Novo Nordisk, which was founded in 1923 to produce what was then a cutting-edge medical treatment: insulin. This is what stability looks like in this ever-changing field: a century of innovation by a company that remains deeply rooted in a small country’s economy, society and scientific culture.
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This is the great difference. If Trump has his way, Zepbound will go back to where it was invented. The intellectual property could very easily be transferred to Eli Lilly’s headquarters in Indianapolis. The manufacturing jobs and the corporation tax bonanza could follow. But Wegovy (and its sister drug Ozempic) are going nowhere. They will always be Danish.
Denmark is a global hub for clinical research and Ireland isn’t. Between 2014 and 2023, 1,290 industry-sponsored clinical trials were conducted in Denmark compared with just 460 in Ireland. Considering that nine of the top 10 pharma companies in the world have bases in Ireland, this deficit is stark.
Now let’s consider what’s going on on the other side of the Atlantic: a war on science. The Trump-Musk idiocracy is attacking the whole idea of evidence-based understanding of reality. Its twin pillars are climate denial and “alternative facts”, both of which require a literal dumbing-down. The US is now like the village in Vietnam that had to be burned down in order to save it. To make America great again, Trump and Musk are setting fire to the scientific institutions that underpin much of its wealth.
In this war, medical and biological science is very much in the front line. Robert Kennedy jnr, who has made a career out of cynical lies about medicines and vaccines, is now in charge of the department of health and thus of public funding for medical research. And Musk has targeted both the institutions that develop that research and the scientists themselves.
Last week, 1,200 employees at the National Institutes of Health, America’s premier biomedical research agency, were summarily dismissed. There were also mass firings of scientists at the Food and Drug Administration and the Centres for Disease Control. And federal funding for scientific research into Alzheimer’s, cardiac disease and other illnesses at universities and institutes of technology has been frozen indefinitely.
This is insane. One of the few things we know for sure about the future is that medical science is making huge breakthroughs and that the development of new treatments will be one of the main drivers of economic growth. Trump is already set on closing off one path to prosperity – the development of the green economy. With Musk and Kennedy he is now blocking the other one.
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But one country’s madness can be another’s road to reason. The biomedical scientists that the US are dumping represent an immense reservoir of intellectual capital. We don’t in fact have to steal it – Trump is giving it away for nothing. He and his gauleiters are not just firing some of the world’s best biomedical researchers – they are creating a hostile environment in which science itself is the enemy of the people.
If the Government has the wit to see it and the guts to go after it, this is a generational opportunity. Ireland produces world-class biomedical scientists. But we do not produce enough of them and we do not support them well enough. Early career postdoctoral researchers (in the humanities as well as the sciences) are paid starvation wages and kept on exploitative and precarious contracts. And our public scientific infrastructure is weak: the State spends half as much on research and development as comparable European governments do.
Trump has given us a wake-up call: we can’t go on relying for economic innovation on the kindness of strangers. But he has also given us something startling to wake up to. Ireland should offer itself as a refuge for American scientists. Use some of that corporation tax bonanza to attract world-class researchers and up-and-coming geniuses to our universities and institutions to work with the excellent scientists we already have. Trump is complaining that we pick America’s pocket. Fair enough – we should instead pick America’s brains.
