Council needs ‘technological sovereignty’

Cork City Council is to “endeavour to use European software and IT services” following a motion passed at the latest council meeting on Monday 8 June.

The motion was proposed by Green Party Councillor Oliver Moran and recognises and supports “a shift in Europe towards technological sovereignty”.

Cllr Moran said in the past year it has become clear that Europe has become “extremely exposed to reliance on, particularly, American software providers”.

“We have seen tangible consequences of that over the last year. We have seen staff of the International Criminal Court being subject to sanction,” he said.

In October 2025, the International Criminal Court (ICC) ended its relationship with Microsoft, after the company disconnected access to the email of the court’s Chief Prosecutor Karim Khan. Khan had been personally sanctioned by the US for issuing arrest warrants for a number of Israeli politicians, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

AI developments have also been subject to US influence. On 12 June, Anthropic - developers of Claude AI - announced that they had been ordered by the US government to cease providing access to their newest models to all “foreign nationals” due to national “security concerns”.

In a statement, the company said that this included “foreign national Anthropic employees”, and that as a result access to the models had to be restricted both inside and outside the US to comply with the directive.

“That’s simply a power that the US government has because these companies are US companies, not European. If European governments, businesses and individuals are using or dependent upon these technologies then the US can simply cut-off access anytime it wants,” said Cllr Moran.

The EU and its member states have been taking measures this year to address this dependency.

In January 2026, the French government announced that it would be ceasing the use of Microsoft Teams and Outlook in favour of domestically developed conferencing software, to “regain control over critical digital infrastructure”.

Earlier this month, the European Parliament also voted in favour of a motion that will see it switch from using Google as its default search engine to the French-developed Qwant.

Cllr Moran said he would like to see a similar move taken by Cork City Council.

“The service that I suggested we use is Ecosia, which is a non-profit search engine company based in Germany, that uses its profits for ecological projects,” he said.

Ecosia is a search engine which uses 100% of its profits to fund tree-planting projects worldwide.

This article was produced with the support of the Local Democracy Reporting Scheme funded by Coimisiún na Meán.