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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2180 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 9, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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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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