Ireland Says It Can Get an EU Capital Markets Deal Done This Year — Here’s What’s Actually at Stake

Simon Harris says a multi-trillion-euro savings and investment union is within reach. Years of national self-interest have killed the idea before. Ireland now has six months and the EU presidency to prove this time is different.

A Deadline With Real Teeth

“I genuinely believe we can get it done in 2026,” Tánaiste and Finance Minister Simon Harris told a Bloomberg event in London. Ireland takes over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union on 1 July, running through to the end of the year — and Harris is positioning the long-stalled Savings and Investments Union as the defining achievement he wants from those six months.

The ambition is not modest. The aim is to unlock a meaningful share of the roughly €10 trillion currently sitting in European household savings accounts, redirecting it into productive investment — equity markets, venture capital, infrastructure, defence and pensions — at a moment when Europe’s reliance on bank deposits over capital markets has left it structurally undercapitalised compared with the United States.

Why This Keeps Failing

The project has a long and largely unsuccessful history under its previous name, Capital Markets Union — an initiative first floated more than a decade ago that has repeatedly stalled over the same underlying problem: national self-interest. Harris was blunt about the pattern that has held the project back. “In the past, everyone approached this with the nationalist jersey on,” he said, calling for member states to abandon that mindset. “This is about making sure Europe wins and we don’t continue to see a significant outflow of investment.”

The technical sticking points are real and unresolved. Core negotiations centre on cross-border deposit treatment, loss mutualisation mechanisms, and the supervisory architecture that would enforce the whole system — questions where national treasuries and regulators retain genuine veto power. Harris has signalled some lines Ireland will not cross even as it pushes the broader agenda: “ESMA needs a greater role, we need supervisory convergence, and we’re not in Ireland supportive of the concept of centralised supervision, certainly not for the sake of it.” That position — backing deeper integration in principle while resisting a fully centralised EU supervisor — illustrates exactly the kind of compromise the presidency will need to broker among 27 member states with genuinely divergent interests.

The Foundation Already in Place

The groundwork has been building for over a year. The European Commission’s Recommendation on Savings and Investment Accounts, work to improve financial literacy across the Union, and the Commission’s broader 2025 push on savings and investment accounts across the EU all preceded Harris’s presidency-year commitments. The European Council, Commission and Parliament agreed a “One Europe, One Market” roadmap in April, setting targets to conclude several major files by the end of 2026, including a new EU-wide corporate regime known as EU Inc, the market integration and supervision package, and the Industrial Accelerator Act. Threads

Ireland’s own presidency programme, published on 10 June, names progressing the Savings and Investments Union and finalising a Council position on the market integration and supervision package as Harris’s personal primary focus over the coming months. “If not now, when, in terms of Europe taking that decision to deepen its capital markets,” he said when presenting the programme.

Ireland’s Domestic Stake

Ireland’s enthusiasm for this project is not purely altruistic European statesmanship — it reflects a genuine domestic problem Harris has been candid about. Speaking at the Irish Investor Awards, he noted that Irish people are among the best savers in Europe yet have one of the lowest levels of retail investment participation on the continent, with roughly €170 billion currently sitting on deposit domestically rather than being deployed into productive capital.

Harris quantified a separate but related problem with unusual precision: a study commissioned by his own department found a gap of between €860 million and €1.3 billion in available capital for Irish companies at Series A funding rounds and beyond, over the next three to five years. “That is the difference between a company that headquarters in Dublin and one that headquarters in London or New York,” he said. “It is the difference between a founder who builds wealth here and one who builds it elsewhere.”

In response, Ireland is building its own domestic Investment Account, designed to make investing simpler and more accessible for ordinary savers, with a target of legislating the framework in 2026 and allowing accounts to be offered from 2027. The government has already cut the tax rate on investments in funds and life assurance policies from 41% to 38% in Budget 2026, and increased the Seed and Venture Capital Scheme allocation to €250 million through 2029, the largest commitment in the scheme’s thirty-year history.

What Success Would Actually Mean

If implemented at the scale Harris is describing, a multi-trillion-euro aggregation of European savings would meaningfully redirect euro-area capital flows and alter the pricing of sovereign and corporate securities across the bloc — a structural shift, not a marginal policy tweak. For European businesses competing for growth-stage capital against deeper American and Asian markets, deeper integration could narrow a funding gap that has, for years, pushed promising European companies to relocate headquarters and fundraising activity abroad once they outgrow domestic seed and venture support.

The Honest Risk

European capitals have a well-documented habit of arriving at EU presidencies with ambitious agendas and leaving with partial progress, precisely because compressing genuine national interest differences into a six-month political window is extraordinarily difficult — a dynamic this exact project has already demonstrated repeatedly under its previous name. Harris’s own rhetoric implicitly acknowledges the stakes of failing again: as he put it at a separate address, “the cost of not doing it is the cost we are already paying. Companies sold too early, founders relocated too soon.”

Whether Ireland’s presidency produces the “big transformation moment” Harris is promising, or simply the latest chapter in a decade-long pattern of stalled ambition, will become clear well before the presidency hands over to the next country at the end of December.

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