“As regards the overall Irish strategy, I would encourage Ireland to continue to take the appropriate decisions that they took at the very beginning of the crisis with the frontloading decisions that are very important in all domains and of course including in the fiscal domain which remains very important.”

All the while, they’ll continue to support that so called lifeblood of the economy, the banks:

The ECB will continue to offer banks unlimited one-week and one-month loans until at least January 18th, extending by three months operations scheduled to unwind next month. The bank also said it will offer three-month refinancing loans in October, November and December at interest rates linked to the average benchmark ECB rate over the lifetime of the loans in question.

In other news, the Irish media has copped on to something you and others pointed out a couple of weeks ago, and which well known by now - as mentioned in that Johnson and Boone post yesterday:

This misunderstanding stems from Ireland’s success as a tax haven. Many years ago, Ireland cut corporate taxes to attract business. This created one of Europe’s most impressive tax havens — it is possible to set up a corporation in Ireland, channel sales through that head office (with some highly complicated links to offshore tax havens in order to avoid paying Irish tax) and then pay a minuscule corporate profits tax. Ireland boasts a large industry of foreign “tax minimizers” that do this, but these tax minimizers hardly employ any people. Nearly one-quarter of Irish G.D.P. comes from the profits of these ghost corporations.

And Carl O’Brien today:

But for all this genuine investment, there is evidence that many firms have been moving here in more recent times to use Ireland as a kind of flag of convenience, without investing or creating any meaningful employment.

The Revenue Commissioners are aware of around 20 such firms which have relocated here – or are considering doing so – over the past year or so who pay “little or no tax here”. Any firm which fits this category doesn’t have a base here worth speaking of.

Tax avoidance is a grey area. And exploiting the cracks in the system isn’t a crime. But the damage in terms of our reputation abroad as a kind of “Wild West” for multinationals could be considerable.

That’s if we have any reputation left to protect. We’ve done a good job on our own in bringing our the Irish banking system to near collapse. German taxpayers, who are bailing out Hypo Real Estate following its purchase of Depfa, a German bank which was headquartered in the IFSC, have also been quick to pin much of the blame on Ireland’s light-touch regulation.

Actually, its not a very thorough article.

It doesn’t mention who built the facilities, or benefitted from the small amount of actual investment these company were willing to put into Ireland. In Cherrywood, the development build by Liam Carroll, which has been taken into NAMA has a number of anchor clients - HP, Microsoft etc. How much of whatever these companies spent here came from IDA or other grants - the rest I assume was tax deductable. How much of the spend was lost through tax breaks for developers. He provided some jobs, but how much of what it cost in terms of wages did he actually fork out, or was it simply based on loans from AIB or Anglo (where developers rolled their debt) and how much of those loans used to pay for those jobs has now been written down, or taken into NAMA which plans to put further money into the development, and which ultimately will be paid for by the tax payer.

The state should employ people directly. Its much more ‘efficient’.