Ireland gets 5 times the rate of Corporation Tax per head as France or Germany

letitroll said:
The obvious answer is that we need to do a better job leveraging the MNC base to build genuine domestic champions.....Enterprise Ireland success stories....that one day might spawn an Irish company that could be part of the FANG's.
Click to expand...
The grim truth is that successive governments have badly neglected indigenous Irish industry in favour of what we used in the 80s term footloose multinationals whom inevitably in time will up sticks and abandon this country.
 
T McGibney said:
The grim truth is that successive governments have badly neglected indigenous Irish industry in favour of what we used in the 80s term footloose multinationals whom inevitably in time will up sticks and abandon this country.
Click to expand...

Well 40yrs and counting isnt a bad run........not sure a man who's married to his wife for 40yrs would be called footloose

The point still stands though - you want your a balanced book......and our book of employment and corporate tax skews way to heavilty to towards one subsector FDI.

At these point in the cycle where Ireland clearly is at capacity from an external investment perspective we should cycle resources to Enterprise Ireland vs. FDI.......likewise domestic industry via special share options/RSU schemes should be given the ability to compete for the limited & likely already employed tech talent working in the FDI economy.....the FDI companies will complain......and thats when you know your doing the right thing longer term for Ireland.
 
I get your point but we really have to leave behind the idea that we can only foster indigenous industry by strengthening or creating an agency or quango. Put bluntly, the current system in Ireland bureaucratises and taxes entrepreneurs to death
 
T McGibney said:
Put bluntly, the current system in Ireland bureaucratises and taxes entrepreneurs to death
Click to expand...

Totally agree - I'm sure the folks in Enterprise Ireland try their best - but it isnt Sequoia Capital were talking about here thats for sure.

Create a system where getting fabulously wealthy via entrepreneurship or getting modestly wealthy working in indigenous entrepreneurial companies was a bet with much better odds than exist today......you'd measure this by surveying how many MBA students coming out of Trinity/Smurfit DONT end up in a multinational....my guess today is that 90%+ of MBA grads do....this is not a good outcome
 
Last edited:
nest egg said:
Dan O'Brien was on Radio 1 last Sunday and made that point too. He also said that organisations like the IMF and OECD have never ever accused Ireland of being a tax haven.
Click to expand...
Yes, they never do.

Offensive comments are usually actioned by random inexpert economists casting a jaundiced eye on Ireland's corporate tax yield.

The trouble is that they are believed - even in Ireland and even by one poster on this thread.
 
fundamental misunderstanding of rule of local law here, methinks. Surprisingly, all the big MNCs doubled down on their footprint in Ireland when the BEPS initiative became real ... who've guessed? Answer = no-one anywhere!
 
nest egg said:
Dan O'Brien was on Radio 1 last Sunday and made that point too. He also said that organisations like the IMF and OECD have never ever accused Ireland of being a tax haven.
Click to expand...

Indeed Ireland is not a tax haven - has never and will never meet the criteria.

However to be clear we leverage the intersection of EU tax law (cross EU border sales, IP/transfer pricing from an Irish domiciled HQ structure) which overlayed against US tax law which allows for the deferral of corporate tax from CFC's (controlled foreign corp).

Combine the above with our ability to speak American (i.e. English), can do attitude and 40yr track record in FDI such that our economies business model is now FDI.......and Ireland is THE answer for US corporate looking for a low risk, predictable EU subsidiary location.

The reality around our regime is that Capital Hill tomorrow with a stroke of pen could remove the tax deferral provision and tax overseas profits at whatever prevailing US rate they wanted too. They dont, because its to their companies advantage to have effectively untaxed or minimally taxed overseas cash piles from which they can acquire and grow overseas empires......the 'value' accrues to the retirement savers of 401k products in the USA that get to hold internationally dominant MNC's who's financial muscle to acquire or organically grow is unparalleled.

We dont rob Uncle Sam - we are in business with Uncle Sam.
 
So we changed our company incorporation laws to allow multinationals move their IP here. In reality though no intellectual property has actually moved because the brains of the multinationals are in California and not Dublin. That's why the IFSC is so big but we don't have a comparable scientific or technical body. Therefore most of the "innovative " regarding us multinationals in Ireland is financial and legal but not technical. That's a key reason why Ireland has not been able to "leverage " its multinational IP to create domestic IP, the IP never existed here to start with it is a legal and financial entity. Any highly talented technical guys will be brought over to the US operations and any big changes in irish operations technically are overseen by US based engineers and technicians. That's because the US guards it's key technical IP jealously
 
joe sod said:
So we changed our company incorporation laws to allow multinationals move their IP here. In reality though no intellectual property
Click to expand...

We didn't change anything really - what changed is that the modern digital economy that replaced the industrial economy is one that is effectively dominated by IP. That IP or the licensing of IP to allow the scaling of a business locally became location agnostic and allowed for a shell game of legal tax avoidance.

joe sod said:
That's a key reason why Ireland has not been able to "leverage " its multinational IP to create domestic IP, the IP never existed here to start with it is a legal and financial entity.
Click to expand...

Not quite accurate - sure the legal and financial entities are here obviously - but what is here and is arguably more important than even the initial technologically derived IP is the business scaling know how.

The know how, for example, on how to scale an advertising based social network. Or how to grow the hell out of B2B enterprise SaaS product that has found product market fit. This isn't technically IP - but Dublin represents possibly the single best hub to scale a social media company (multilingual sales/support, advertising, trust and safety, GDPR) anywhere outside of Menlo Park. I find it disappointing for example that an Irish company couldn't have come up with TikTok and grew it from Dublin - in the same way actual TikTok is using Dublin to scale its non-China/non-US business.

Same as regards enterprise SaaS products- the US MNC's haven't left us twiddling bottle caps in Ireland like some hollowed out caribbean island.....I think your view is a little outdated.....true global corporate leadership positions are run out of Ireland subsidiaries of MNC's......even your financial services example is wrong....Barclay runs their whole European investment bank out of Dublin - ditto Bank of America , Citi's TTS...I could say the same in Life Sciences, Tech etc.
 

Having worked in large MNC's and some of the firms mentioned above. There has always been a feeling within the companies I worked for that the real decision makers lie overseas and a view that Ireland is either a regulatory requirement or there because of tax. I think they miss a beat in leveraging the true talent of the Irish workforce, I've worked internationally for over decade in various industries and I always think the 'Irish' just get it.
 
MrEarl said:
If only we were investing all of this additional corporation tax, wisely
Click to expand...
A shortage of money has almost always been the constraint in this country when trying to get anything done. At the moment we have more than enough money but other factors are acting as constraints, the most common of which is skilled labour, but the narrative persists that money is the problem we we keep throwing money at problems, which is money wasted. Money which could be saved until a time when money again becomes the constraint.
 
Purple said:
Money which could be saved until a time when money again becomes the constraint.
Click to expand...

Agree with this - the government sector expanding as it is into an economy that is at capacity is a poor allocation of capital in absolute terms and in timing terms....it represents likely very low ROI on incremental spends, crowds out the private sector and drives inflationary pressures.

Unfortunately prudent management of fiscal expenditure, through the cycle, is pretty much incompatible with liberal democracy......spending other people's money (OPM) to further one's political aspirations inside election politics is the bug in the system. The gold bug/bitcoiners are correct about one thing - its in the nature of our system to drive sovereign indebtedness upwards over time and reset debt burdens via inflationary shocks that devalue the currency mixed with underlying productivity gains.

Whats the saying - its terrible way to organize an society, if it weren't for the fact that all the alternatives are way worse.
 
I'm afraid the MNC I know well is responsible for 10pc of all Irish addreses of US patents per annum. The ownership resides with the corporation however.

So its a massive generalisation to think only Calif based engineers and scientists are creating IP, whist the irish are stuffing boards with widgets
 
letitroll said:
I find it disappointing for example that an Irish company couldn't have come up with TikTok and grew it from Dublin - in the same way actual TikTok is using Dublin to scale its non-China/non-US business.
Click to expand...
So do I. And I don't buy the excessive bureaucracy/taxation angle.

Otherwise, we wouldn't have many of our successful businesses, which often started from humble beginnings and grew to be large businesses.

Regarding IT, If an Irish business had invented Facebook, it would have sold it to one of the US tech giants.
 
It's very convenient for some large and financially better off nations to point the finger at Ireland, when it comes to our corporation tax arrangements.

Dare I suggest that they might also seek to put us on an equal footing with them, so that we've similar natural resources, similar access to large markets and suppliers by land and rail etc.

Let's start with insisting that the EU fund and build tunnel connections for us with France and Spain, to inside a high speed rail line, so that we can move goods and people more easily, and at a lower cost....
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Menu
Log in
Register