Facebook debacle is reminder that Ireland is facing an existential crisis of its own

Facebook has a licence to print money. In fact, it has two.

The first is its business model, which allows an enormous network of ordinary people to share unprecedented volumes of personal and often private information about themselves – information that Facebook can collate and cross-reference to make perhaps the most detailed profile of huge swathes of the global population that the world has ever seen.

Its second licence to print money comes ...