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This has been a long time in coming, and is significant for the EU as a whole because of Ireland is the designated lead regulator for data privacy issues. This Politico article [0] from last year has a great overview of the history including background on how Ireland wound up taking a lead role on tech regulation in Europe.

[0] https://www.politico.com/story/2019/04/24/ireland-data-priva...

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"Designated lead regulator" - isn't it just that most companies picked Ireland simply because their privacy authority was the one least willing to take any action?

Them finally doing something would be huge.

These companies came to Ireland not because of this but because of lower corporate taxes and an English speaking population; they arrived long before privacy regulation was on the table in Europe.

As well as being the only English-speaking country in the eurozone

Yeah but Ireland does everything to not lose them over privacy regulations. The delegation of authority to national regulators is a big weakness in GDPR.

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