The Rotating Presidency of the Council of the European Union: Theory vs Practice

On 1 July, Ireland formally took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union with a launch ceremony at Dublin Castle, with notable figures in attendance — European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky among them. For the next six months, Dublin will chair EU ministerial meetings, draft compromise texts, and choose which items reach ministers’ desks and when. Formally, the role is supposed to cover neutral, administrative functions, with the state holding the presidency acting as a broker of the collective interest of all twenty-seven member states.

In practice, the gap between formal neutrality and the office’s actual influence has long been an object of interest forscholars of EU politics. Political scientist Jonas Tallberg’s landmark study of EU negotiations found that the rotating presidency functions as a power platform that gives whichever government holds it concrete opportunities to shape not only the way negotiations are run, but their results. Other researchers have described something closer to an ex-ante veto or gatekeeping role: the chair controls what reaches the table, which means it can delay an issue, downgrade its importance, or drop it from the agenda altogether, just as easily as it can accelerate it. The Council’s own library revisited this question just last year, in a seminar built around the question of how much real independence the office still confers. The consensus across this literature is that the gap between formal neutrality and practical agency is not an oversight in the system’s design, but rather a structural feature that the chairing government is free to use.

Ireland’s Presidency Flagship Priority

Helen McEntee, Ireland’s Foreign Minister, has chosen maritime security as her priority for the presidency, as a significant portion of the Northern Hemisphere’s subsea data cables run directly through or near Irish waters — a vulnerability increasingly shared by the EU, with concerns growing over possible sabotage or other forms of hybrid threats. As Irish and EU interests align on this issue, McEntee’s choice seems like a winning one: it lets Dublin lead on a genuinely pressing security issue at no political cost.

While maritime security seems set to be an easy win for the Foreign Minister, two other files inherited by Ireland’s presidency sit far less comfortably in Brussels: sanctions on Russian-linked alumina exports from a refinery in Co. Limerick, and the enforcement of EU tech rules against Big Tech firms famously based in Ireland. In both cases, Irish economic interests cut against Brussels’ overwhelming position. As pressure mounts, the presidency will arguably be assessed, in retrospect, less on the priority Ireland has chosen to lead loudly on than on how it will handle the two it has every incentive to manage quietly.

The Alumina File

At the aforementioned ceremony at Dublin Castle, Zelensky used his speech to draw attention to an awkward detail sitting inside Ireland’s borders. He referred to European companies “owned or effectively controlled” by sanctioned Russian oligarchs that continue to supply raw materials to Russia’s war effort. Behind the diplomatic embellishinglay Aughinish Alumina, a refinery on the west coast of Ireland, the majority of its shares owned by Rusal, the Russian aluminium giant that Swedish tax authorities have concluded remains under the control of sanctioned oligarch Oleg Deripaska. Zelensky also made clear that he had been tracking Dublin’s own investigation into the plant, saying he hoped it wouldn’t take long to conclude. Reporting published in March by the Irish Times, working with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, had already detailed how alumina from the plant has been shipped to Russian smelters and, from there, sold on to a company supplying Russia’s arms industry.

Days after Taoiseach Micheál Martin outlined Ireland’s presidency priorities in Strasbourg, the European Parliament attached amendments to a Ukraine-accession report calling for a full ban on alumina exports to Russia —seemingly aimed at Aughinish. The wider resolution passed comfortably with 460 votes to 136 with 59 abstentions, which includedFianna Fáil’s four MEPs — Martin’s own party. One of them, MEP Barry Andrews, said afterwards that he supported ending the trade in principle, but argued that the amendment’s wording was too blunt and failed to account for the risk to Europe’s own aluminium supply chain.

The government’s own investigation, opened in response to the reporting, concluded on 24 July. Minister for Enterprise Peter Burke described the outcome as having “no adverse findings”, with investigators not able to confirm that Aughinish’s alumina was reaching Russian arms manufacturers. At the same time, Burke said, they could not rule out the possibility, as the investigation was hindered by a lack of verifiable trade data from inside Russia since 2022. The report did establish, however, that shipments to Russia had risen substantially since the invasion, and Burke was candid about the limits of the investigation, saying that “the evidentiary threshold that would stand up in a court of law” was not reached and that “suspicion is not evidence.” The findings were passed to the European Commission, which holds sole authority to propose sanctions.

According to sources cited by RTÉ, officials decided against proposing sanctions on Aughinish for the time being, weighing the disruption a ban could cause to the European aluminium market, given Aughinish’s role as a principal supplier to several EU smelters. The Irish Times reported a similar story: alumina was left out of the EU’s 21st sanctions package for reasons of economic cost rather than any findings that the trade was safe.

Taken together, the sequence is notable less for any single decision than for its overall shape: an investigation that reached no firm conclusions, followed by a Commission choice that avoided one too. In turn, McEntee has said Dublin would “work with” the Commission if sanctions were to be eventually proposed — a commitment that, so far, has not been followed by any action.

The Big Tech File

Behind Aughinish, however, lies a tension far more consequential to Ireland’s finances. Ireland’s economic model has long depended on being the preferred, low-friction European base for US multinationals — something plainly evident in tax and tech regulation if nowhere else. This was made clear in 2016, when the European Commission ruled that Irish tax arrangements had given Apple up to €13 billion in illegal state aid, letting the company pay an effective tax rate as low as 0.005% on its European profits. Dublin’s response was telling, as it refused to collect the windfall and instead appealed alongside Apple, arguing against its own multi-billion payday. The European Court of Justice finally confirmed the recovery order in 2024, making it the largest state-aid case in EU history.

Today, the same dynamic still runs through Ireland’s Data Protection Commission, which serves as lead EU regulator under GDPR for Meta, Google, Apple, TikTok, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and PayPal. The DPC’s track record is one of needing to be pushed: in the landmark Meta data-transfer case, its own draft decision judged the fine disproportionate, and it took the European Data Protection Board overruling Dublin to produce the eventual €1.2 billion penalty in 2023 — the largest GDPR fine ever issued. Privacy advocates have described the DPC’s pace on complaints against the firms headquartered within its borders as painfully slow, and reporting this past October found Meta’s lobbying in Dublin and Brussels intensifying in step with the Trump administration’s own pressure campaign against EU tech rules.

Now, Ireland is chairing a presidency during which the EU is meant to be accelerating AI Act’s implementation and tightening DMA/DSA enforcement. Just before the handover, however, the Commission’s own “simplification” package of digital rules was already watered down at Council level at the same time as the bloc quietly pushed back a key AI Act deadline by sixteen months. Ireland’s own presidency programme describes this loosening as “better regulation, not deregulation” — language that suggests Dublin plans to continue, rather than reverse, that drift.

Neutral in Name, not in Practice

The rotating presidency’s institutional design assumes that the country in the chair is there to pursue the EU’s collective interest, while giving it enough agency to defect toward its own national agenda. Ireland’s first weeks in office seem to reflect this, suggesting that the assumption of neutrality doesn’t hold as cleanly as the theory implies. On one issue where Irish and EU interests align — maritime security — Dublin has been vocal and consistent. On the two issues where they may diverge — an alumina trade whose Irish-led investigation reached no firm conclusion, and a Big Tech sector Ireland has a demonstrated history of regulating loosely — the pattern so far is inconclusive process and procedural caution. While this is not a story of Irish bad faith, it is a story about what the presidency’s tool kit rewards. Any small state whose economic model relies on being the EU’s most permissive access point — be it for commodity trade, for capital, or for corporate headquarters — would likely use the chair the same way Ireland seems to be using it now: to manage friction quietly, under the cover of the technocratic process, on a timeline that suits its own economy. Ireland is not an unlucky exception borne of coincidental timing out of a system that otherwise works as advertised. Rather, it is simply the clearest current illustration of a gap in the system’s design.

What to Watch

The Commission’s decision not to include alumina in its 21st sanctions package — a decision that sits uneasily next to the Parliament’s own vote three weeks earlier calling for exactly this ban — does not close the question, as attention now turns to a 22nd round and pressure from the European Parliament and from Kyiv does not seem to be receding. Whether alumina resurfaces there, and how Ireland positions itself if it does, is likely to be the clearest test of whether this summer’s caution was a one-off or part of a long-term pattern.

Elsewhere, it is worth watching the Data Protection Commission’s next major decision involving Meta or another of theUS tech firms it regulates, and whether Brussels will again have to intervene to sharpen its result. The Anti-Tax Avoidance Directive, a file on Ireland’s own presidency agenda, is another to watch given that it is expected to receive a cool reception from the very government tasked with advancing it.

And in December, when Ireland hands over the chair to Lithuania, the presidency’s legacy will likely rest less on its achievements on maritime security than it would like , compared to how its most consequential files were handled.