Yesterday, some sobering figures were revealed: For the first two months of 2025, pharmaceutical exports from Ireland to the United States made up – in terms of monetary value if not volume – some 63% of this country’s entire export economy. Last year, Ireland exported €44.4 billion in pharmaceutical products to the United States, which would account for somewhere between 8 and 10% of the country’s entire gross domestic product.
Understand those figures and you might start – start – to understand just how reliant this country has become on the big pharma sector as a source of revenue and employment. Understand that, and you might start to understand the sheer terror in Dublin at the prospect of the American President disrupting that flow of trade with the tariffs he has now repeatedly promised to impose.
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