Opinion
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The former Taoiseach Albert Reynolds once said that an Irish General Election was a series of 41 constituency by-elections. The vagaries of our proportional representation system mean that a modern Irish election can throw up all kinds of results. The landscape of Irish politics has been thrown into even greater uncertainty by the extraordinary destruction of Fianna Fáil which lost three-quarters of its seats in 2011 (dropping from 78 to 20 TDs). Though for me FG is more conservative, all I could reply was that Fianna Fáil were a party of the entrepreneurial bourgeoisie and Fine Gael of the commercial bourgeoisie The narrative for this forthcoming general election is already well-known. Taoiseach Enda Kenny is now seeking the kind of mandate Fianna Fáil used to get in former years. The rhetoric of stability once deployed by Fianna Fáil, is now being marshalled by Fine Gael. Kenny has staked his ground with the mantra, “Keeping the Recovery Going”, while making sure to register humility about the electorate who have brought about the economic improvement. The Taoiseach is understandably playing on the anxiety of voters about the potential for economic reverse if its voting facilitates a weak coalition government comprising disparate parties of left and right with little or nothing in common. In fact 1977 was the last time an Irish party won an outright majority and Governments which lack an actual parliamentary majority have proved to be among the most successful. Lemass led without a majority in the 1960s and Haughey did so again in the 1980s. A three-party coalition led by John Bruton, with little common ideology, ran quite smoothly from 1994. It appears that both Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael actually perform best when under the watchful eye of smaller parties. Clearly there is going to be a coalition. However, the real conundrum for the electorate is that the great probability is that Enda Kenny will be returned as Taoiseach though the likelihood of Fine Gael being back with Labour on their own is very much an outside chance. It is more likely that Renua and other independents will make up his numbers. Traditionally there has been a leader of the opposition who could put together a coalition alternative to the parties in power. A fully effective leader of the opposition has to credibly state to the electorate his (or her) chance of becoming Taoiseach. The numbers now, and since 2011, do not allow Micheál Martin to make this claim. The only way he could possible claim to having a chance of being Taoiseach after the election is if he consents to forming a government containing his own party, Sinn Féin and assorted independents or smaller parties of both left and right. A hung Dáil could throw up all sorts of permutations and there is an outside chance that there would be enough, disparate parties other than Fine Gael to form an administration. However, it seems unlikely that Micheál Martin would become Taoiseach and exclude both Fine Gael and Sinn Féin from government, thus stranding both in opposition. Indeed Martin’s decision to rule out forming a government with or containing Sinn Féin has allowed Gerry Adams to cleverly state that voting for Fianna Fáil is an irrelevance. Adams has made the argument that since Fianna Fáil would go into power with neither Sinn Féin nor Fine Gael then it is pointless for voters to give it support. Sinn Féin is probably the only party in the political system, along with the radical parties of the left, that could, if it chose, openly claim that it is fighting the election in order not to go into power. However, it does not appear willing to embrace this particular high-risk gambit. Nevertheless since Sinn Féin appears to be playing a longer game Fianna Fáil will have little to complain about if Sinn Féin actually does pass it out in this particular general election. Alternatively, if voters take it that there is no alternative to Fine Gael back in the saddle, they might construe this as giving them in effect ‘a free vote’. This could see the creation of a clear, Sinn Féin-led, left-wing opposition to the status quo though when faced with the challenges of being in government Sinn Féin will no doubt knuckle down, just as it has done in the North. Whatever the result it is most likely that it will be open to the leaderships of both Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, with inevitable reticence, to form a grand coalition. This intriguing possibility has its supporters in both political parties. It is noticeable that a good many of those who serve on the Fianna Fáil front bench are privately in favour of this should the election results make it possible. On the Fine Gael side of the house figures like Simon Coveney have been explicit in not ruling this out. It would of course spell the end for both Enda Kenny and Micheál Martin. Maybe it is for this reason that the younger, more ambitious members, in both parties seem keener. There is after all much in common between the two big parties. Indeed the differences are famously elusive. The Economist magazine, in 2011, described Fine Gael as centre-right, Labour as centre-left and Fianna Fáil as nationalist, and of course two biggest parties were germinated in opposing stances during the civil war. Beyond this, Fianna Fáil’s sobriquet is ‘The Republican Party’ and it was for a while somewhat unsympathetic to the British perspective. In his history of Fianna Fáil, ‘the Party’ (1986) Dick Walsh noted that Fianna Fáil was as much a movement as a party, had always attracted as many rich people as Fine Gael and as many poor people as Labour. Donal O’Shea’s ‘80 Years of Fianna Fáil’ defines it as a “catchall party… appealing to all classes”. Walsh said its policies always defied definition and quoted De Valera as advising, “always keep you policy under your hat”. As to the difference, a French newspaper once
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By Frank Armstrong. In the 2012 documentary ‘Dreamtime Revisited’ poet-philosopher John Moriarty climbed Derada Hill in his adopted home of Connemara. Observing its hinterland he remarked that all about him was crooked, from the contours of the Oranmore River to the crooked coast towards the Aran Islands and the crooked horizon of the Twelve Bens. He calls this his “wonderful crooked world”. In most of the country that elliptical scene is familiar. And it seems to have found a reflection in a human character where straight lines are avoided: in our literature language has been distorted and remade; traditional Irish music allies bewitching interchange between minor and major keys with polyrhythmic time; in day-to-day exchanges a sense of humour is often prized above other qualities, including honesty. Travelling west from the Pale into wilder terrain these qualities grow more pronounced: mythos overwhelms logos in the sodden bog of collective memory. In France terroir connotes the long-standing relationship between a people and their landscape that is said to impart distinctive flavours to the food and wine produced there. In Ireland, where gastronomy has traditionally been awarded a low priority, terroir might be observed in linguistic and musical dissonances that spring from the undulating, even chaotic, landscape. We talk about what the Dutch would do if they lived in Ireland, but perhaps they are a product of the straight lines on their sunken horizon, and the practical concern of keeping the ocean at bay. Perhaps they would simply do surprisingly little. Even the Irish weather, grudgingly benign at least until recent times, finds a reflection in the periodically sullen and infuriatingly inconsistent Irish temperament. We might all recognise its description by Samuel Beckett’s character Molloy: “I know it was warm again the day I left but that meant nothing in my part of the world where it seemed to be warm or cold or mild at any time of the year”. The poor quality of the built infrastructure here would be insufferable in other parts of Europe at a similar latitude where it has been built to endure harsher winters. Ireland is on the periphery of Europe and this contributes to the strangeness of its culture and the fact that it takes a status quo, bordering on the ridiculous, for granted. Observed empirically, to some extent Ireland retains the political economy of a post-colonial outpost, now a tax haven. Une isle derriere une isle according to one French geographer – spared both Roman conquest and barbarian hordes – the country did not join the European mainstream. Ireland was a repository of learning and mysticism during a brief golden age, then passed into a millennium of obscurity before a shuddering encounter with an advanced civilisation from the neighbouring island. The ensuing appropriation imposed a system of individual private property ‘from Heaven to Hell’ distinct from what had been characteristically communal arrangements under native Brehon Law. Being the victim of the first adventure of the British Empire also necessarily generated an antipathy to rules and laws, since they were imposed in the interest of the coloniser, not the natives. Sui generis, Ireland is the only country whose population was greater in the 1840s than today, due to the Great Famine and its legacy. The unique trauma of starvation and forced emigration led to short-termism, and the ascendancy of expediency over ideology or even ideas. A current legacy of this attitude is the ingrained hostility to planning and indeed environmentalism: “you can’t eat the landscape”. The Irish Nation is a product of the late eighteenth century when the movement of the United Irishmen failed to unite all creeds: simultaneously in 1795 the orchestrated emergence of the Orange Order and of Maynooth University that created a quasi-established Catholic Church put paid to the aspirations of Wolfe Tone and his colleagues. The Old English descendants of the Normans and the native Gael coalesced inviolably in the end, to form an overwhelmingly Catholic nation. The Normans might now be perceived as having tempered a native tendency towards the fast and loose, but contemporary English observers bemoaned the cultural slippage that attended the medieval wave of colonisation: as if the rivers flowing from the hilly regions inhabited by the Gael imbued the plain-dwelling Normans with their characteristics. The Protestant New English who arrived primarily in the seventeenth century descended into a familiar decadence albeit preserving a singular sectarian identity by avoiding miscegenation. Only in the north east corner, within the cultural orbit of lowland Scotland, did a distinct culture emerge. Ireland’s dramatic landscape is not unique, but what is unusual is first an isolation from and then a quite sudden absorption of its substantial population (by comparison with the equally untamed Scottish Highlands for instance) into as advanced a polity as early modern England’s. An Irishman Other has long acted as a foil to the sober, judicious Englishman and often revels in his allotted role as revolutionary misfit, bard and poet. From this we might trace a cultural tolerance of drunkenness. The contradictions between the two cultures engendered a great cultural ferment that animated an Irish literary Renaissance that began at the end of the nineteenth century. In its wake Irishmen were awarded a remarkable four Nobel Prizes for literature, and this with James Joyce, widely regarded as the pre-eminent novelist of the twentieth century, missing out. Even a century later what seem parochial themes resonate beyond our shores such that an unremarkable rock band like U2 compose songs that connect with a global audience. But translate the crookedness of the Irish character into Irish politics and what do we find? If in literature the distortion of language can be art, in politics it is artifice. Corruption, famously found by the Mahon Tribunal to be “systemic and endemic” is the unreconstructed manifestation, but there are other more insidious twistednesses. They have spawned the laxity whereby a politician can say one thing to one crowd and another to the next. Enda Kenny can assert Ireland’s commitment to Climate Change
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By Joe Higgins. The Oxfam Davos Report published on January 18 got relatively little media coverage here and was buried after twenty-four hours. Yet its content is truly shocking, pointing to a world that is witnessing massive inequality and an ever-widening chasm in the wealth of the big majority of humanity as against that of a tiny elite. For the first time in history the wealth of the richest 1% is greater than the aggregated wealth of the remaining 99%. €40 billion annual profits of Irish registered companies lie completely outside the tax net This should be a central feature in the current General Election campaign because it has huge ramifications for global developments that will impact on Ireland but also because chronic inequality is growing apace in this State also. You wouldn’t think that from the statements of the establishment political parties, nor from the issues emphasised by the big-business-owned media. In fact there is a concerted effort to not go there as seen in the controversy around the so-called ‘fiscal space’. The contrived debate on the fiscal space is really designed to shut down any meaningful discussion on what wealth exists here and how it should be shared and managed. It wants to confine commentary to the narrowest of parameters around an estimated €10 billion that will be available in extra public spending over the next five years based on assumptions of a certain level of economic growth. What this shuts out is any opening up of a debate on the massive wealth that exists outside of the current parameters of taxation policy and practice. Hence we have not only Fine Gael, Labour and Fianna Fail focusing obsessively on this, but Sinn Féin also chastising the other parties for being ‘irresponsible’ in their approach in exaggerating the amount available. Excluded therefore is any consideration of the €30 billion in extra wealth that the richest 300 in this State have garnered since 2010 according to the Sunday Independent Rich List while the majority groaned under the yoke of austerity. Excluded also are the massive profits reaped by big business including the major multinational corporations and the derisory tax that is levied on them. It is well known that the headline 12.5% corporation rate is but a vague target. It would be very generous to the corporations to say, as Eurostat figures do, that they pay an effective rate of 8.3% but if we were to take that as true, it would mean a very significant €2 billion each year could be raised if the headline were insisted on. Over five years that would immediately double the ‘fiscal space’. For every 1% increase after that there would be an extra annual €500 million for public investment and services. This is not even to take account of the work of Trinity College Associate Professor of Finance, Jim Stewart, who told an Oireachtas Subcommittee in 2014 that a massive €40 billion annual profits of Irish registered companies lies completely outside the tax net. The Anti Austerity Alliance Budget Statement from October 2015 outlines how massively increased resources could be made available for major public investment in areas like social and affordable homes and greatly improved public services by taxing the real wealth that exists. Where these extra funds could be raised in addition to the corporation tax increased intake, would be a ‘millionaires’ tax on wealth, an increase in tax for individuals earning over €100,000 per year and a Financial Transactions Tax. Depending on the rates applied, extra income of up to €10 billion a year could be realised. In view of the Oxfam report and the growing inequality in Ireland itself the debate should urgently begin on national and international taxation policy and the massive shift of wealth from the 1% to the 99%. In the United States Bernie Sanders, describing himself as a democratic socialist, is generating major political waves and massive support among working people and the poor, with his call for a “‘political revolution”. The Left in Ireland is the only force that is attempting to inject similar ideas in to the election campaign here. If the electoral initiative of the Anti Austerity Alliance-People Before Profit achieves the requisite seven Dáil deputies to form an official parliamentary group in the next Dáil, that debate can be significantly advanced here also. Joe Higgins TD is Director of Elections for the Anti-Austerity Alliance
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Enda Kenny’s real vision is to make Ireland the “best little country in the world in which to do business”. Business doesn’t deserve him. Worse, business doesn’t deserve the rest of us. Business in Ireland is utterly corruptible. Big business in particular, Perhaps small businesses do their best but even there farmers are over-subsidized and led by millionaires, retailers and restaurants are homogenised and over-priced, and builders have for generations specialized in sprawl and mediocrity. BIG BUSINESS Let’s have a look at bigger businesses. Biggest indigenous companies Big business is most obviously represented on the Irish Stock Market whose members’ average capitalisation is around €2.5bn. Member companies typically eschew the tedious rigors of ethics. Village did several pieces recently documenting the dubious history of building materials group CRH, Ireland’s biggest company with a worldwide turnover of €19 billion (2014). Why would Enda Kenny in God’s name think the most important thing is to be the best little country in which to do business? Since the 1930s CRH has been intermittently beset at its edges by conspiracies, scandals and corruption, together with repeated allegations of its involvement in criminal price-fixing and market-sharing. When, 40 years ago, Roadstone Ltd took over Irish Cement which had a monopoly in cement production in Ireland, Roadstone had a dominant position in downstream operations such as quarries, concrete and tarmac. Bad start. There were political fingerprints everywhere. The first Chairman of the new Cement Roadstone Holdings was the retired Taoiseach, Sean Lemass. After Lemass’s death in 1971, there was an abortive attempt to make Charles Haughey chairman. Richard Bruton once worked for CRH as an accountant. In February 2000, Mary Harney gave an undertaking that the Revenue Commissioners, Competition Authority and the soon-to-be-instigated Office of the Director of Corporate Enforcement (ODCE) would carry out a comprehensive investigation into CRH, but this has never happened. Patrick Massey, then head of the Competition Authority, resigned his position that very same month stating: “it is no longer possible for me to continue as director of competition enforcement due to the failure to provide adequate resources to enable me to do the job properly”. Depressingly, in May of this year Gardaí and officials from the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (CCPC) raided Irish Cement’s offices in an investigation – but only into the €50m bagged-cement industry. DCC is Ireland’s second biggest indigenous company. The Supreme Court found that, when DCC sold its stake in Fyffes, a fruit and vegetable distributor, for €106m in early 2000 at an €85m profit, DCC had inside information – price-sensitive trading reports . But no prosecution ensued as the CEO had been following legal advice, albeit as it turned out bad legal advice. The lesson is get yourself a bad lawyer. Since the 1930s CRH has been clouded by conspiracies, scandals and corruption, together with repeated allegations of its involvement in criminal price-fixing and market-share Banks Until seven years ago the banks were the biggest forces on the stock exchange here. In 2008 Ireland’s banks were bailed out by the state for €64bn – €14,000 per head. Ireland’s bank bailouts cost the country the equivalent of nearly 40% of its annual economic output, most of which it is unlikely to see again. Ireland topped the chart, spending 37.3% of GDP, followed by Greece at 24.8%. France, Italy and Finland, spent next to nothing on bank bailouts. In the US the Treasury expects to recover all but $42bn of the $370bn it lent to ailing companies, with the portion lent to banks actually showing a slight profit. It is clear we owe the banks nothing. In fact, after an awful lot of moral hazard, luck and heartache, the State could eventually recoup all the cash used to bail out AIB, Bank of Ireland and Permanent TSB. This would leave the €35bn cost of bailing out Anglo (€29.6bn) and INBS (€5.4bn). For that is down the tube. Anglo Irish Bank – to say the least – overdid it on the commercial side, was nationalized and closed down after costing the state €29bn with its protagonists facing, or having faced, criminal charges, its CEO a fugitive, and off-account loans to directors. Its head of capital markets admitted they initially asked for 7bn to suck in the government which would then be so committed that it would have to give the balance. He said he ‘plucked the figure out of his arse’. That’s Business I guess. Nama The State-owned bad bank, NAMA was created to work through Ireland’s largely problematic commercial loans which it is parceling up into packages which it calls Projects and to which it gives irritating names, like ‘Eagle’, before flogging them at bargain basement prices to vulture funds. Often since the banks in Ireland are still dormant, US ones. The sellout is masked by the boom which means NAMA will still realise a profit on the prices it paid in 2008 in an imploded market. Mick Wallace, an Independent TD, has made allegations – significantly, in the Dáil – over the €1.6bn Project Eagle portfolio sale to US investment trust Cerberus by Nama which got approx 27c in the dollar. That missing 73p has been picked up by the Irish taxpayer, Wallace has claimed £Stg 45m has been paid to fixers. Investigations are ongoing over €9.5 m discovered in an Isle of Man off-shore account. The UK’s National Crime Agency and even the US Department of Justice are investigating the matter. Wallace claimed that Irish taxpayers had covered the cost of massive losses on the deal while the US investment fund, which boasted former US vice president Dan Quayle among its senior ranks, Moribund Democratic Unionist Party leader Peter Robinson has vehemently rejected allegations he was to receive any payment linked to the Project Eagle sale after he was named at a parliamentary committee in the North. Mick Wallace is a failed former big developer and his loans have now actually been bought by Cerberus. Wallace has claimed a representative of Cerberus
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It has been a long and hard struggle for a Financial Transaction Tax in Europe. Now it looks like a breakthrough is possible. This has yet to make an impression on the Irish media and there has been no critique of the Irish Government’s refusal to participate. The European Commission had proposed an EU-wide Financial Transactions Tax but failed to get the necessary unanimous support. Eleven Member States decided to proceed with introducing it through what is called the ‘enhanced co-operation’ procedure. These were Belgium, Germany, Estonia, Greece, Spain, France, Italy, Austria, Portugal, Slovenia and Slovakia. It was given a green light in January 2013. Even the International Monetary Fund has stated that the financial services sector is under-taxed Britain took a case to the Europeaember States as to what they were actually going to do. Now it’s down to the wire. The December 8th meeting of ECOFIN economics and finance ministers is widely seen as the make or break moment for the Financial Transactions Tax. The prospects are surprisingly good. France is pushing it, as it really needs new sources of finance if the COP 21 climate outcomes are to be ambitious and to be implemented. Germany remains determined but warns it must happen now or never. Angela Merkel has been clear all along “that financial markets have to contribute their share to the recovery of economies”. The final proposal must be agreed unanimously by all participating countries. They are working towards the progressive implementation of a tax that would involve a harmonised minimum 0.1% tax rate for transactions in all types of financial instruments except derivatives (to which a 0.01% rate would apply). It is suggested that this would enable the financial sector to make a fair and substantial contribution to tax revenues and complement regulatory and supervisory measures by creating a disincentive to transactions that “do not enhance the efficiency of financial markets”. There are blocks to be overcome. It seems that there is agreement to tax shares, corporate bonds and all derivatives with the exception of derivatives linked to sovereign bonds. This means particular issues for indebted nations are addressed. However, agreement has still not been reached on how the Financial Transactions Tax should be levied. Some Member States have also put forward specific proposals to meet their particular needs. If they do get agreement the Financial Transactions Tax would be levied from the second quarter in 2017. This is a small tax but with the potential to raise significant revenue for hard-pressed national budgets. It is estimated that the tax will raise between 30 and 35 billion Euro for the eleven Member States involved. NERI, a thinktank, has estimated that the tax would increase exchequer revenue by €350 m per annum in Ireland. Who could say no to that? At a time when tax revenue is needed to address alarming levels of poverty and homelessness and to restore damaged and diminished public services, why would an Irish Minister of Finance say no to an additional €350m? At a time when new revenue is needed to fund global development and the Sustainable Development Goals and measures to respond to climate change and the conclusions of COP 21 why would he say no? It is ultimately a measure of the power of the financial services sector in Ireland and its ability to influence politics. Michael Noonan says there would be job losses and that financial services would desert us for London. This argument fails to reflect the low level of tax proposed and the very favourable conditions enjoyed by companies in the Irish Financial Services Centre. Those campaigning for the tax – in a campaign organised by Claiming Our Future, argue that it would actually increase jobs because of the additional public expenditure. The Irish government put €64bn of public money into rescuing the banks. Some €42bn of this was borrowed. Over 20% of our public debt is now a result of the bank bailout. The Irish people are estimated to be paying €9,000 Euro each for the banking-crisis debt – the highest in the world. Across the rest of Europe, the average cost per person is just €192. Even the International Monetary Fund has stated that the financial services sector is under-taxed. It is not too late. Member States can sign up to enhanced co-operation at any time. We need a Minister for Finance who will say yes to a tax that would yield much needed revenue, reduce financial speculation, and ensure the financial sector pays its way.
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Two recent events highlight the true nature of the ongoing Irish economic recovery. Firstly, ahead of the infamous Ireland-Argentina Rugby World Cup match, the press office of the main governing party, Fine Gael, produced a rather brash infographic. Charting projected growth rates in real GDP for 2015 across all Rugby World Cup countries, the graph put Ireland at the top of the league with 6.2 percent forecast growth. “FACT: If the Rugby World Cup was based on economic growth, Ireland would win hands down”, shouted the headline. Having put forward a valiant performance, the Irish team went on to lose the game to Argentina, ending its incipient ascendancy. Secondly, within weeks of publication, Budget 2016 – billed by the Government as a programme for the ‘New Ireland’ – has been discounted by a range of analysts, including those with close proximity to the State, as representing the return of a fiscal policy of …electioneering. Worse, judging by the public opinion polls, even the average punter out there has been left with a pesky aftertaste from the political wedding cake produced by Merrion Street on October 13th. Tasteful or not, the public gloating about headline growth figures and the fiscal chest-thumping that accompanied Budget 2016 did not stretch far from reality. Official growth is roaring, public finances are in rude health, and the Government is back in the business of handing out candies to kids on every street corner. The air is filled with the sunshine of recovery and talk about the Celtic Tiger Redux is back on the menu for South Dublin along with the fennelised lamb. Ireland by the numbers On budget day the government projected full-year 2015 inflation-adjusted growth of 6.2 percent followed by 4.3 percent in 2016. Extraordinarily optimistic, “one minister acknowledged that the growth figure for this year is likely to end up nearer to 10% than the 6.2% estimated just 6 weeks ago”, according to a story on the front page of the Sunday Business Post in late November. Much less optimistic, the IMF has the figures at 4.9 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively. Still, this ranks Ireland at the top of the advanced economies’ growth league, with second place Iceland at 4.8 percent and 3.7 percent, respectively. The only other advanced economy expected to post above 4 percent growth in 2015 is Luxembourg. Which is dramatically telling: of all euro-area member states, the two most exposed to tax optimisation schemes are growing the fastest. Though only one has a Government gushing publicly about that fact. No medals for guessing which one. The problem is: the headline official GDP growth for Ireland means preciously little as far as the real economy is concerned. The reason for this is the composition of that growth by source and, specifically, the role of the Multinational Corporations trading from Ireland. We all know this, but keep harping on about the said ‘metric’ as if it mattered. Based on the figures for the first half of 2015 (the latest available through the official national accounts), the Irish economy grew by €6.4 bn or 6.9 percent in real GDP compared to the first half of 2014. Gross National Product, or GDP accounting for the officially declared net profits of multinational companies, expanded by a more modest 6.6 percent over the same period. Other distortions arising from this structural anomaly at the heart of the Irish economic miracle are the effects of foreign investment funds and companies on the capital side of the National Accounts. Back in 2014 the European Union reclassified R&D spending as investment, superficially inflating both GDP and GNP growth figures. Since then, our investment has been booming, outpacing both job creation and domestic public and private sector demand. In more recent quarters, capital investment has been outperforming exports growth too. Which compels a question: what are these investments about if not a tail sign of corporate inversions past and a forewarning of the changes in the pattern of economic output in anticipation of our heralded ‘Knowledge Development Box’? Beyond this, the legacy of the financial crisis has compounded the artificiality of growth statistics. Irish ‘bad bank’, Nama, and its vulture-fund clients are aggressively disposing of real estate loans and other assets bought at regrettable cost to the taxpayer. Any profits booked by these entities are counted as new investment here. Once again, GDP and GNP go up even if there is virtually nothing happening to buildings and sites which are being flipped by these investors. And while we are on the subject of the old ways, last month Ireland was announced as the domicile of choice for an upcoming merger between Pfizer and Allergan – two giants of the global pharma world. Despite numerous claims that Ireland no longer tolerates so- called ‘tax-driven corporate inversions’ (a practice whereby US multinationals domicile themselves in Ireland for tax purposes), it appears that we are back in the old game. Just as we are apparently back revenue shifting (another corporate tax practice that sets Ireland as a centre for the booking of global sales revenues despite no underlying activity taking place here), as exemplified by the Spanish Grifols announcement earlier in October. Just when we thought we were out they pull us back in! All of these growth sources also benefit from the weaker euro relative to the dollar and sterling, courtesy of ECB printing presses. Looking at the national accounts for January-June 2015, Gross Fixed Capital Formation accounted for €3.8 bn or almost 60 percent of total GDP growth over the last 12 months, and nearly three quarters of total GNP growth. In simple terms, the real economy in Ireland has been growing at closer to 3.5 or 4 percent annually in 2015 – still significant, but less impressive than the 6-percent-plus figures suggest. exchequer kindness Still, the above growth has worked well for the Irish Government. In the nine months up to September 2015, Irish Exchequer total tax receipts rose a strong €2.75 bn, or 9.5 percent year-on- year.
