It’ll be the people of the country receiving the money from the fine since Meta, owner of companies such as Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, has its international headquarters in Dublin.

Even more money could be expected though as the latest Apple illegal State aid case is up for hearing at the European Court of Justice. The original case had been lost by Apple, putting them €13 billion in debt to the Irish government.

Despite this, the Irish Government has appealed the case due to the reliance on multinational tech giants to grow the economy.

The DPC criticised the government for the Meta decision, with a Green Party TD the belated fining of Meta had showed it “failed miserably) in its duties.

Patrick Costello, Green’s justice spokesman, said “To be clear, this ruling happened despite the Irish Data Protection, not because of it. This ruling is the result of a decade-long case on Meta’s involvement in US mass surveillance. It involved three judicial reviews against the Irish DPC The original DPC decision was overruled by EPDB who insisted on the record fine imposed here and that Meta must suspend the transfer of data from the EU to the US.”

“This is not the first time that the Irish DPC have failed to levy appropriate fines against tech multinationals. In the Irish Council of Civil Liberties report last week, which examined the enforcement of GDPR across Europe, it found that Irish deductions on GDPR were overruled by 75% of the time by the EPDB. The next highest rate of overrule was France with 2%. It’s clear that the Irish DPC is failing miserably in protecting not only Irish citizens, but EU citizens as a whole.”

The Dublin South-Central TD added that “Ireland benefits massively from corporation tax receipts from tech giants, such as META. With this comes responsibilities to protect your privacy of these platform’s users. To date we have not lived up to that.”