Ireland is a tax haven. In the 1970s and 1980s, life in the civil-war wracked country was hard - between poverty, scarce employment and civil unrest, the country hemorrhaged its best and brightest. As the saying went, "Ireland's top export is the Irish."
--
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/17/erin-lets-go/#circumvention-haven
1/
@pluralistic Hearing the country I grew up in referred to as "civil war wracked" is strange. In the 1980s and 1990s at least, most Irish people hated the tactics of the IRA.
The British government under Thatcher was not seen as a fair broker for peace, and the RUC was wildly sectarian, but Irish solidarity at the time was much more strongly with folks like John Hume and the SDLP than with Sinn Féin and the IRA.
Growing up in the West of Ireland, the North always felt like a distant conflict.
@pluralistic Is Ireland a Trojan horse to force technological and financial powers into Europe?
And perhaps continue to maintain illegal structures and policies by leveraging economic blackmail?
In desperation, Ireland's political class hit on a wild gambit: they would weaponize Ireland's sovereignty in service to corporate tax evasion. Companies that pretended to establish their headquarters in Ireland would be able to hoard their profits, evading their tax obligations to every other country in the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ireland_as_a_tax_haven
2/
@pluralistic This wasn't the only thing they did. They made college free to ensure a well educated young professional class, and invested in fiber optics for telecommunications backbone. They were also getting a lot of EU Development Funds to build roads, ports, and airports, and renovate inner cities. And Michael D. Higgins, as Minister for Culture and the Gaeltacht gave sweetheart deals to movie studios for movies like Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan to raise Ireland's profile.
@dneary @pluralistic Lots of good infrastructure investment (and friends from Ireland found it hilarious that British builders were building lots of it for Irish people this time round ;))
The scale of the Irish corporate capture is huge. When the EU found that Apple avoided €13bn in taxes owed to Ireland the Irish government tried to appeal it along with Apple, and it was 2024 before they were literally *forced* to collect the taxes they were owed.
@etchedpixels @pluralistic That's not how the Irish government would characterize it - the EU found that Ireland's tax code was in breach of EU competition rules, and their treaty commitments. They were ordered to collect taxes that they had not asked for.
@dneary @pluralistic Fair point. Now ask yourselves how many countries would have said "Oh we've got to collect tons of taxes from a bunch of rich Americans and spend them on our people, we'd best appeal against that" ?
Total capture.
@etchedpixels @pluralistic You're not wrong. At the time it felt like the EU dictating domestic policy - the kind of thing Farage and his ilk take as evidence of EU intrusion on national sovereignty.
A single country - poor, small, at the literal periphery of a continent - was able to foundationally transform the global order. Any company that has enough money to pretend to be Irish can avoid 25-35% in tax, giving it an unbeatable edge against competitors that lack the multinational's superpower of magicking all its profits into a state of untaxable grace somewhere over the Irish Sea.
3/
The effect this had on Ireland is...mixed. The Irish state is thoroughly captured by the corporations that pretend to call Ireland home. Anything those corporations want, Ireland must deliver, lest the footloose companies up sticks and start pretending to be Cypriot, Luxembourgeois, Maltese or Dutch. This is why Europe's landmark privacy law, the GDPR, has had no effect on America's tech giants. They pretend to be Irish, and Ireland lets them get away with breaking European law.
4/
The Irish state even hires these companies' executives to regulate their erstwhile employers:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/01/erin-go-blagged/#big-tech-omerta
But there is no denying that Ireland has managed to turn the world's taxable trillions into its own domestic billions.
5/
The fact that Ireland is cashing out less than 1% of what it's costing everyone else is terrible for the world's tax systems and competitive markets, but it's been a massive windfall for Ireland, and has lifted the country out of its centuries of colonial poverty and privation.
6/
There are many lessons to be learned from Ireland's experiment with regulatory arbitrage, but one is unequivocal: even a small, poor, disintegrating nation can change the world system by offering a site where you can do things that you can't do anywhere else, and if it does, that poor nation can grow wealthy and comfortable.
What's more, there are plenty of "things that you can't do anywhere else" that are *very good*. It's not just corporate tax evasion.
7/
