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Notes -
Yeah, I think given Ireland's reputation as a low-tax jurisdiction it's often surprising to those abroad to learn how selectively this low-tax regime applies.
Income tax is genuinely super low for low earners, but the technical "higher band" of income tax (42%) kicks in at just €35k, and increases incrementally up to 52% at €70k - ie every euro over that is taxed at 52% for most workers. Most people working in the tech sector are paying quite high income tax in Ireland, and very high (by European standards) tax on financial products and investments. Even though the corporate tax rate is one of the lowest in Europe, that's just to get companies in the door - we are certainly NOT Dubai on like a personal scale, contrary to what some of our peer countries imagine.
Also the weather is shit and there are too many foreigners (25% approx foreign-born), in a sort of Canadian social-anomie sense.
So is that why Ireland's policies just turned it into an offshore tax haven rather than attracted foreign businesses?
Not quite, we actually do attract a lot of real foreign business to Ireland, but our high personal taxes certainly shape the profile of this unfavourably.
For example - Google is the largest private employer in Dublin, with (from memory) about 6500 direct Google employees here and the same amount again in TVCs. All other large US tech companies bar Amazon also have their EU HQ here, and employ thousands of staff each. Ireland is also a major manufacturing hub for pharma, with genuinely world-class infrastructure and facilities (side note, for about 20 years the entire global supply of Viagra was produced in Cork). In aggregate, about 25% of workers in Ireland are employed directly by a foreign multinational - so the state earns far, far more in income taxes from these multinational employees than it does in corporate taxes on their employers' profits.
However, our steep personal taxes mean that mid- and senior- career employees often look to another jurisdiction after a few years, once they're earning serious money (and have got an Irish passport). We lose a lot of talent this way, and it keeps some activities here lower down the value chain. Not great.
Additionally, the Irish govt did a couple of dodgy deals in the 1990s and 2000s to give extremely favourable tax treatment to a handful of individual companies, which earned us a lot of ire and bad press, and also has muddied the water about where our competitive tax regime (legitimate, and less generous than many EU and US states) ends and where actual uncompetitive and unethical shenanigans begin
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