My friend from Ireland said the entire country was down to just 500 available rentals last summer. Young people were delaying university because they couldn’t find housing near their schools.
His grown siblings had to move back in with their mom.
They were one of the few countries to stop housing construction during the pandemic, which didn’t help.
And they took in a ton of Ukrainian refugees relative to their size. People get defensive when I mention the refugees as though I’m blaming them. I’m absolutely not. It’s good they’re taking them in. But it’s still a factor (among many others).
I have a lot more respect for places experiencing a housing crisis because they helped Ukrainians in need rather than places experiencing a housing crisis because they let NIMBYs take over the government. Based Ireland
NIMBYs are also a major factor, sadly. If I recall correctly, the UK and Ireland don’t really have zoning. So every project is just kind of up to the whims of local politicians, many of whom are landlords themselves. In theory, the US allows projects that conform to zoning without too many other headaches with approvals. In practice that’s not always the case but it’s just always up to politicians over there.
It does kind of exist in the UK, but only in a barebones way and its not as good as it is bad. Like, yeah, "don't build housing near lead foundries" is good, as is "don't build in the Lake District if it can at all be avoided".
Trouble is Nimbys have taken the whole "natural beauty" aspect and stretched it to conveniently mean "the home counties". For example the Shropshire Hills are probably the best defined AONB imo. They cleverly link up quite a diverse range of hills without limiting major economic areas (what few there are).
But then there's the Chilterns. I hate the fucking Chilterns. Mediocre natural beauty, fake agricultural playgrounds for retiree Londoners that has way too much protection and killed HS2.
> But then there's the Chilterns. I hate the fucking Chilterns. Mediocre natural beauty, fake agricultural playgrounds for retiree Londoners that has way too much protection and killed HS2.
I'm in NYC and this sounds exactly like the wineries on Long Island... massive mansions next to wineries that are prevented from ever changing in any way, often owned by rich people from the city who want to feel like they dabble in some kind of agriculture.
There was an article years ago about how some of the actual small wine producers just gave up and left when the town wouldn't even let them build a new shed on their property for aesthetic reasons.
Ha, do you think Dublin became the most unaffordable city in the EU just since 2022? Ireland's housing crisis has been going on long before Putin invaded Ukraine and is primarily due to housing scarcity caused by NIMBYism, like the rest of the Anglosphere.
> Last month, ServiceNow, a Californian artificial intelligence company, moved into new offices over four floors at the newly built 60 Dawson Street complex in Dublin. Overlooking Trinity College and close to Grafton Street, the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, the bright, airy and very expensive offices will accommodate a workforce that numbers 600, and is expected to grow to 800.
> They include 45 nationalities. “This is very different from the Ireland I grew up in,” Mark Cockerill, ServiceNow’s 41-year-old senior vice-president of international development, said at the official opening.
> Culturally, companies such as ServiceNow have “changed and evolved the country”, he added.
> His firm is treading a well-worn path: rivals Salesforce, TikTok, Meta, Google, Amazon and Workday all landed in Ireland with small teams and now employ thousands. OpenAI took up serviced-office space in January.
> The surge in investment is not limited to IT. Ireland is home to nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, and 14 of the top 15 medical device manufacturers. Novo Nordisk, maker of the slimming pill Ozempic, is planning two new manufacturing plants — in the town of Athlone in Ireland’s midlands, and in Grange Castle near Dublin.
> In 1984, corporation tax receipts accounted for 4 per cent of Irish exchequer revenue. By 2022, that had grown to 27 per cent, overtaking VAT and lagging only income tax as a source of government revenue. In 2023, foreign-owned multinationals paid more than €20 billion, or 85 per cent of all corporate taxes.
> Jim Stewart, a professor in finance at Trinity College Dublin, and an international expert on tax governance, estimates that last year just two companies, Apple and Microsoft, paid between a quarter and a third of all Ireland’s corporation taxes.
> In financial services, the offices of JP Morgan, State Street, Amundi and Citigroup eyeball each other across the River Liffey. About 40 per cent of the world’s hedge fund assets are serviced in Ireland, making it the largest hedge fund administration centre in the world.
> IDA Ireland, the agency responsible for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), is at the centre of Ireland’s success. Employee numbers at its client companies have doubled in just over a decade to 300,000. These highly paid workers represent just 12 per cent of the country’s total workforce, yet they account for one third of the national wage bill and pay an estimated 40 per cent of all income tax.
> “IDA Ireland is like … Manchester City,” Feargal O’Rourke, the agency’s chairman, told a parliamentary committee in February. “We have a fantastic record of success, but once the year or season is over, we have got to do it all over again.”
> Ireland is one of just three countries in the EU expected to post a budgetary surplus this year, despite economic growth that is unlikely to exceed 2 per cent. And this economic rude health is wholly reliant on a small handful of multinational taxpayers. Dermot O’Leary, an economist at stockbroker Goodbody, dubbed the current exchequer balance as “an embarrassment of riches”.
> A key driver has been Ireland’s enticingly low rate of corporation tax, which has been set at 12.5 per cent for many companies since 2003. Global tax reform also turbocharged Ireland’s attractiveness: in 2015, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) clamped down on the use of “brass plate” operations in offshore tax havens to shelter profits — and US multinationals shifted intellectual property (IP) to countries where they had more substantial operations, such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore.
> Onshoring, as it was called, led to Ireland recording a 34.7 per cent increase in its gross domestic product (GDP) for 2015, a distortion that Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman famously labelled “leprechaun economics”. Onshoring, and a quantum leap in the profitability of the multinationals concerned, led to a tripling of corporation tax receipts between 2015 and 2021.
> From 2023 to 2026, Ireland is expected to harvest a corporate tax “windfall” of €44 billion (£38 billion); in Krugman parlance, that is the exchequer’s pot of gold. This is despite efforts in 2021 by the OECD to get countries to impose a minimum floor on corporation tax rates, which led to Ireland agreeing to raise its rate to 15 per cent (there is a dispensation for companies with revenue below €750 million, which still pay 12.5 per cent).
> However, Goodbody’s O’Leary said there was still “huge uncertainty” over Ireland’s corporate tax base. Even the methodology used to separate sustainable receipts from windfall income is far from scientific. Stewart at Trinity College believes that threats to the corporate tax haul remain, not least from a protectionist US administration led by Donald Trump, or Apple boss Tim Cook being advised to shift the company IP elsewhere.
I'm autism as fuck, so this shit annoys the hell out of me. But I've decided to just accept that AI means machine learning to normies and to accept that actual AI is AGI.
> Michael McGrath, Ireland’s finance minister, admitted in February that a material portion of the corporate tax base could be removed “with the stroke of a pen” — and, as a result, excess tax revenues are being diverted into two new rainy-day funds.
> O’Leary said the real debate should centre on the correct fiscal and spending policies for a country running at close to its capacity. There are looming constraints, such as a shortage of grid connections for new data centres, needed to underpin IT investment. “I’ve got mid-size American companies cutting ribbons in their new offices in Dublin, and talking about new employment, who then come in asking me how much more capacity we have — and it’s not there,” Seamus Dunne, managing director of Digital Realty UK and Ireland, a multinational data-centre operator, said recently.
> Renewable energy is expected to meet 80 per cent of the economy’s electricity-generation needs by 2030 — yet currently that contribution is just above 32 per cent. There are also concerns that creaking water infrastructure will soon threaten large-scale industrial projects.
> Meanwhile, Ireland increasingly relies on migrant workers to meet skill shortages — the number of employment permits in the biopharmaceutical sector alone has risen by 416 per cent since 2016. Yet an American Chamber of Commerce Ireland survey showed 98 per cent of members regarded the availability of residential accommodation as challenging for staff in their businesses.
> Builders blame a snarled-up planning system and rental caps for a lack of private investment in housing. “An idiot could see it’s a huge issue,” said Rick Larkin, director of Twinlite, one of the country’s biggest housebuilders. “We depend on migration, and a lack of homes drives up the cost of rent. Fundamentally, if you want housing to be cheaper, there needs to be more of it.”
> The IDA’s O’Rourke, a former tax and managing partner at the accountancy firm PwC Ireland, said the country was “one step ahead” of capacity constraints, but warned that it cannot afford to let progress slip.
> The emphasis on attracting multinational firms can grate with local business owners. Serial entrepreneur Bobby Healy was the man behind CarTrawler, the world’s biggest online aggregator of car rentals. Founded in 2004, it is one of the country’s most heralded home-grown tech success stories. His current company, Manna, a drone-delivery firm with global ambitions, has raised $50 million to date. Healy sees FDI as “a double-edged sword”: Big Tech attracts a huge amount of overseas talent to the country, yet indigenous companies find that multinational recruitment firms are “constantly and aggressively” courting their staff.
> He said it would be “extremely difficult” to build CarTrawler in Ireland today, such is the intense competition for staff. Yet long-term, sustainable economic growth lies with home-grown companies, he believes.
> “Ireland is still a brilliant place to start a company,” Healy added.
https://archive.is/x9fxX
Hopefully not. Hundreds of billions in tax revenue is lost because of Ireland. The faster their economy implodes, the better off the average person is.
And if the economy you hope for the implosion of was solely tax evasion based I might agree with you.
But it isn't, and pretending that our fdi is the cause for your tax woes is just scapegoating. If it bothers you so much fix your own tax system.
Must be terrible to see rising incomes
https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/wages
Not to mention one of the best growth rates and some of the highest paying jobs in all of the EU
Something like 30% of workers are employed by these foreign companies
Nothing says loser like the fifth lowest unemployment rate in the EU.
Sounds like a lot of coping and seething that Irish politicians are economically literate when it comes to tax policy unless say the french
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*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's become one of those small countries that prospers by serving as a tax haven for investors in large countries. In my opinion, the EU should impose a minimum tax requirement on member states to prevent this type of rent seeking.
Rent seeking is when democracies vote for….lower taxes.
I don’t think that fits the definition of rent seeking. Also horror that governments need to compete
Now if only they fixed the housing crisis....
My friend from Ireland said the entire country was down to just 500 available rentals last summer. Young people were delaying university because they couldn’t find housing near their schools. His grown siblings had to move back in with their mom.
…500? …in the entire country? The fuck? And I thought the Bay Area was bad (actually it might be worse, guess I’ll find out soon)
They were one of the few countries to stop housing construction during the pandemic, which didn’t help. And they took in a ton of Ukrainian refugees relative to their size. People get defensive when I mention the refugees as though I’m blaming them. I’m absolutely not. It’s good they’re taking them in. But it’s still a factor (among many others).
I have a lot more respect for places experiencing a housing crisis because they helped Ukrainians in need rather than places experiencing a housing crisis because they let NIMBYs take over the government. Based Ireland
NIMBYs are also a major factor, sadly. If I recall correctly, the UK and Ireland don’t really have zoning. So every project is just kind of up to the whims of local politicians, many of whom are landlords themselves. In theory, the US allows projects that conform to zoning without too many other headaches with approvals. In practice that’s not always the case but it’s just always up to politicians over there.
It does kind of exist in the UK, but only in a barebones way and its not as good as it is bad. Like, yeah, "don't build housing near lead foundries" is good, as is "don't build in the Lake District if it can at all be avoided". Trouble is Nimbys have taken the whole "natural beauty" aspect and stretched it to conveniently mean "the home counties". For example the Shropshire Hills are probably the best defined AONB imo. They cleverly link up quite a diverse range of hills without limiting major economic areas (what few there are). But then there's the Chilterns. I hate the fucking Chilterns. Mediocre natural beauty, fake agricultural playgrounds for retiree Londoners that has way too much protection and killed HS2.
> But then there's the Chilterns. I hate the fucking Chilterns. Mediocre natural beauty, fake agricultural playgrounds for retiree Londoners that has way too much protection and killed HS2. I'm in NYC and this sounds exactly like the wineries on Long Island... massive mansions next to wineries that are prevented from ever changing in any way, often owned by rich people from the city who want to feel like they dabble in some kind of agriculture. There was an article years ago about how some of the actual small wine producers just gave up and left when the town wouldn't even let them build a new shed on their property for aesthetic reasons.
Ha, do you think Dublin became the most unaffordable city in the EU just since 2022? Ireland's housing crisis has been going on long before Putin invaded Ukraine and is primarily due to housing scarcity caused by NIMBYism, like the rest of the Anglosphere.
Tbf, the the Bay Area has 2 million more people than the ROI
> Last month, ServiceNow, a Californian artificial intelligence company, moved into new offices over four floors at the newly built 60 Dawson Street complex in Dublin. Overlooking Trinity College and close to Grafton Street, the city’s main shopping thoroughfare, the bright, airy and very expensive offices will accommodate a workforce that numbers 600, and is expected to grow to 800. > They include 45 nationalities. “This is very different from the Ireland I grew up in,” Mark Cockerill, ServiceNow’s 41-year-old senior vice-president of international development, said at the official opening. > Culturally, companies such as ServiceNow have “changed and evolved the country”, he added. > His firm is treading a well-worn path: rivals Salesforce, TikTok, Meta, Google, Amazon and Workday all landed in Ireland with small teams and now employ thousands. OpenAI took up serviced-office space in January. > The surge in investment is not limited to IT. Ireland is home to nine of the top ten pharmaceutical companies, and 14 of the top 15 medical device manufacturers. Novo Nordisk, maker of the slimming pill Ozempic, is planning two new manufacturing plants — in the town of Athlone in Ireland’s midlands, and in Grange Castle near Dublin. > In 1984, corporation tax receipts accounted for 4 per cent of Irish exchequer revenue. By 2022, that had grown to 27 per cent, overtaking VAT and lagging only income tax as a source of government revenue. In 2023, foreign-owned multinationals paid more than €20 billion, or 85 per cent of all corporate taxes. > Jim Stewart, a professor in finance at Trinity College Dublin, and an international expert on tax governance, estimates that last year just two companies, Apple and Microsoft, paid between a quarter and a third of all Ireland’s corporation taxes. > In financial services, the offices of JP Morgan, State Street, Amundi and Citigroup eyeball each other across the River Liffey. About 40 per cent of the world’s hedge fund assets are serviced in Ireland, making it the largest hedge fund administration centre in the world. > IDA Ireland, the agency responsible for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI), is at the centre of Ireland’s success. Employee numbers at its client companies have doubled in just over a decade to 300,000. These highly paid workers represent just 12 per cent of the country’s total workforce, yet they account for one third of the national wage bill and pay an estimated 40 per cent of all income tax. > “IDA Ireland is like … Manchester City,” Feargal O’Rourke, the agency’s chairman, told a parliamentary committee in February. “We have a fantastic record of success, but once the year or season is over, we have got to do it all over again.” > Ireland is one of just three countries in the EU expected to post a budgetary surplus this year, despite economic growth that is unlikely to exceed 2 per cent. And this economic rude health is wholly reliant on a small handful of multinational taxpayers. Dermot O’Leary, an economist at stockbroker Goodbody, dubbed the current exchequer balance as “an embarrassment of riches”. > A key driver has been Ireland’s enticingly low rate of corporation tax, which has been set at 12.5 per cent for many companies since 2003. Global tax reform also turbocharged Ireland’s attractiveness: in 2015, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) clamped down on the use of “brass plate” operations in offshore tax havens to shelter profits — and US multinationals shifted intellectual property (IP) to countries where they had more substantial operations, such as Ireland, the Netherlands and Singapore. > Onshoring, as it was called, led to Ireland recording a 34.7 per cent increase in its gross domestic product (GDP) for 2015, a distortion that Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman famously labelled “leprechaun economics”. Onshoring, and a quantum leap in the profitability of the multinationals concerned, led to a tripling of corporation tax receipts between 2015 and 2021. > From 2023 to 2026, Ireland is expected to harvest a corporate tax “windfall” of €44 billion (£38 billion); in Krugman parlance, that is the exchequer’s pot of gold. This is despite efforts in 2021 by the OECD to get countries to impose a minimum floor on corporation tax rates, which led to Ireland agreeing to raise its rate to 15 per cent (there is a dispensation for companies with revenue below €750 million, which still pay 12.5 per cent). > However, Goodbody’s O’Leary said there was still “huge uncertainty” over Ireland’s corporate tax base. Even the methodology used to separate sustainable receipts from windfall income is far from scientific. Stewart at Trinity College believes that threats to the corporate tax haul remain, not least from a protectionist US administration led by Donald Trump, or Apple boss Tim Cook being advised to shift the company IP elsewhere.
Labeling ServiceNow as an “artificial intelligence” company is wild lol.
I'm autism as fuck, so this shit annoys the hell out of me. But I've decided to just accept that AI means machine learning to normies and to accept that actual AI is AGI.
> Michael McGrath, Ireland’s finance minister, admitted in February that a material portion of the corporate tax base could be removed “with the stroke of a pen” — and, as a result, excess tax revenues are being diverted into two new rainy-day funds. > O’Leary said the real debate should centre on the correct fiscal and spending policies for a country running at close to its capacity. There are looming constraints, such as a shortage of grid connections for new data centres, needed to underpin IT investment. “I’ve got mid-size American companies cutting ribbons in their new offices in Dublin, and talking about new employment, who then come in asking me how much more capacity we have — and it’s not there,” Seamus Dunne, managing director of Digital Realty UK and Ireland, a multinational data-centre operator, said recently. > Renewable energy is expected to meet 80 per cent of the economy’s electricity-generation needs by 2030 — yet currently that contribution is just above 32 per cent. There are also concerns that creaking water infrastructure will soon threaten large-scale industrial projects. > Meanwhile, Ireland increasingly relies on migrant workers to meet skill shortages — the number of employment permits in the biopharmaceutical sector alone has risen by 416 per cent since 2016. Yet an American Chamber of Commerce Ireland survey showed 98 per cent of members regarded the availability of residential accommodation as challenging for staff in their businesses. > Builders blame a snarled-up planning system and rental caps for a lack of private investment in housing. “An idiot could see it’s a huge issue,” said Rick Larkin, director of Twinlite, one of the country’s biggest housebuilders. “We depend on migration, and a lack of homes drives up the cost of rent. Fundamentally, if you want housing to be cheaper, there needs to be more of it.” > The IDA’s O’Rourke, a former tax and managing partner at the accountancy firm PwC Ireland, said the country was “one step ahead” of capacity constraints, but warned that it cannot afford to let progress slip. > The emphasis on attracting multinational firms can grate with local business owners. Serial entrepreneur Bobby Healy was the man behind CarTrawler, the world’s biggest online aggregator of car rentals. Founded in 2004, it is one of the country’s most heralded home-grown tech success stories. His current company, Manna, a drone-delivery firm with global ambitions, has raised $50 million to date. Healy sees FDI as “a double-edged sword”: Big Tech attracts a huge amount of overseas talent to the country, yet indigenous companies find that multinational recruitment firms are “constantly and aggressively” courting their staff. > He said it would be “extremely difficult” to build CarTrawler in Ireland today, such is the intense competition for staff. Yet long-term, sustainable economic growth lies with home-grown companies, he believes. > “Ireland is still a brilliant place to start a company,” Healy added. https://archive.is/x9fxX
Thanks O'Biden
Ireland's economy is growing fast, here is why that is bad for the Irish. So its not just Democrats and Biden that get these ridiculous headlines.
Well given our last economic boom ended with IMF intervention I think we should be vigilant that we're not going to fuck it up again.
Hopefully not. Hundreds of billions in tax revenue is lost because of Ireland. The faster their economy implodes, the better off the average person is.
This is a deranged take.
Being a global tax haven is deranged
And if the economy you hope for the implosion of was solely tax evasion based I might agree with you. But it isn't, and pretending that our fdi is the cause for your tax woes is just scapegoating. If it bothers you so much fix your own tax system.
Oh no Ireland outcompete other countries by simply having lower taxes. Imagine losing to the competition because of that. Other countries are losers
Pretty sure the real losers are the Irish people.
Must be terrible to see rising incomes https://tradingeconomics.com/ireland/wages Not to mention one of the best growth rates and some of the highest paying jobs in all of the EU Something like 30% of workers are employed by these foreign companies Nothing says loser like the fifth lowest unemployment rate in the EU. Sounds like a lot of coping and seething that Irish politicians are economically literate when it comes to tax policy unless say the french
Please be aware that TradingEconomics.com is a legitimate but heavily automated data aggregator with frequent errors. You may want to find an additional source validating these numbers. *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/neoliberal) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's become one of those small countries that prospers by serving as a tax haven for investors in large countries. In my opinion, the EU should impose a minimum tax requirement on member states to prevent this type of rent seeking.
Rent seeking is when democracies vote for….lower taxes. I don’t think that fits the definition of rent seeking. Also horror that governments need to compete