If all of this seems to fall back in time, it was Ireland’s Apple deal that the president chose to identify as a bête noire in his (mainly) chummy exchanges with Micheál Martin.

While he had plenty to say about historical incentives offered to pharmaceutical companies to attract them away from the US, it was Apple that he chose to namecheck and highlight the effect of punitive judgements imposed on Big Tech.

Mr Trump said Apple had been “treated very badly” by the EU in relation to a decade-long case for backdated payments which forced it to pay €14bn to Ireland in the world’s biggest tax case.

The decision raised a direct complaint to the White House from the company’s longstanding CEO Tim Cook.

The deals which were challenged date back to 1991 and 2007.

However, the final victory for Europe took the gilt off the trading gingerbread for Apple.

While sales of iPhones, iPads, and subscription services increased the company’s quarterly revenues by 6% to $94.93bn during the three months that ended in September, the one-time payment reduced quarterly profit by 36% to $14.74bn.

The US president’s comments can be interpreted as another warm-up for the long-signalled clash with Brussels over what the Republican government views as an ingrained European hostility towards the tech giants of the US.

Apple, Google, Meta, and the X platform owned by Elon Musk face hefty fines — or even mandatory divestment orders — from dozens of ongoing EU investigations covering antitrust concerns, and rows over content moderation.

Mr Trump describes the cases against American companies as a “form of taxation”.

Further arguments loom over monitoring and mediating content.

Europe has enacted multiple laws in recent years commencing with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the Digital Markets Act, and, last year, the AI Act — which establishes a regulatory framework for AI.

Unsurprisingly this is viewed as overreach and micro-management by Big Tech, which is one of the reasons we are hearing arguments from the likes of US vice-president JD Vance about censorship and freedom of expression.

When Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was standing down its fact-checkers, he said: “We’re going to work with president Trump to push back on governments around the world.”

Europe has an “ever-increasing number of laws institutionalising censorship” Zuckerberg said.

In any tariffs war, we cannot assume that Europe is well-placed to fight on the technology frontier because we have few meaningful sovereign alternatives to take on the market-dominant services and products which are provided by the US.

As with defence, our failure to stand apart from our American cousins is now coming back to bite us.

In the commercial battlefield of AI, we must conclude if we wish to avoid future lectures from the White House.

The impact of the Chinese technology and AI upstart DeepSeek and the speed at which it arrived is an instructive example of what can be achieved with ingenuity and focus.

€25,000 parking space in Cork 

The fact an auctioneer is seeking €25,000 to secure a single car parking space near University College Cork seems to indicate that some people have not received the memo about the 15-minute city.

The space is within the walls of Suncroft in Victoria Cross, an area which has seen a major influx in student accommodation over the past decade.

It is only big enough to fit a car or medium-sized van.

Sherry Fitzgerald has described the space as being in “a most convenient location opposite Hennessy’s Centra” and “on the doorstep of UCC and all major hospitals and bus services to the city centre”.

This comes in a week that Cork City councillors voted to remove 14 public spaces for bus routes with a warning that more will be required in the future.

One councillor described it as a recipe for friction and unrest.

And, it seems, an opportunity for profit.

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Journalism, trust, and the truth 

If you ask reporters to provide you with the reasons why they went into journalism, you can expect a diversity of answers. But it is a certainty, particularly from certain age groups, that a specific event will be cited as inspiration.

That episode in history was the Watergate break-in and the subsequent investigation which led to the downfall of Richard Nixon, the 37th US president.

Last summer saw the 50th anniversary of the book, All the President’s Men, which provided the account of the “second-rate burglary” and joined all the dots back to the Oval Office.

Next April will mark the release of the film in 1976 in which Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman were cast as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two Pulitzer Prize-winners from The Washington Post.

As a foundation text for investigative journalism, it’s difficult to surpass and is constantly referenced throughout the world.

At the 2017 tribunal into the circumstances surrounding the case of Garda whistleblower Maurice McCabe, its chair, the judge Peter Charleton, would debate with journalists the extent to which anonymous sources can be protected. 

The case of Deep Throat, the legendary character providing tip-offs and leads, would usually be adduced as evidence.

It was timely this week that the annual Reuters lecture was delivered by Jelani Cobb, the dean of Columbia Journalism School for the past five years, and a staff writer at The New Yorker.

Mr Cobb was addressing the theme of “who can we trust?” His speech began with the arrival of covid-19 in his city and the various conspiracy theories which attended it. 

There emerged, he said, “an entirely different information ecosystem, one prominently anchored in social media and often, though not exclusively, right-wing news outlets”.

The problem with demagogues, he warned, is that they feel no need to render the complexities of the world in their proper nuances and details. They paint in broad strokes and primary colours.

There is also, he said, the danger of capitulation and cited the refusal of Associated Press to adhere to Donald Trump’s demand to refer to the body of water commonly known as the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”. 

This has earned Associated Press a ban from White House briefings. The organisation's reporters and photographers are prevented from travelling with the president.

It is with some understatement that Mr Cobb says: “It is odd that any news organisation, certainly any American one, would continue to attend White House briefings or travel with the president while a reputable outlet has been exiled for a decision made on editorial principle.” 

Part of the solution in building trust in society, he says, is to rely more heavily on local media, a sector which has been heavily savaged by technology’s disruption to the business model and, as the editor of the Irish Examiner pointed out in a podcast this week, from the havoc delivered on newspaper production and distribution by covid lockdowns.

But more than that, we need to find a shared definition of trust. 

Media organisations, says Mr Cobb, should help create a more equitably sceptical public by documenting and hyperlinking every source on significant pieces of journalism and demonstrating, as scientists must, how conclusions are reached.

Showing your work under a heading “how this story was reported” throws down a gauntlet for other types of service and platform and individuals who compete for public attention and support. At the very least it rebuts the mealy mouthed accusation of “fake news.” 

Who you trust will be one of the hallmarks of an active citizen for the rest of this decade. We must, each of us, be careful with our choices.