I don’t know how we’ve been getting record corporate taxes year after year (to say nothing of our income taxes on the higher salaries tech companies pay thousands of Irish employees), and yet:

• Infrastructure remains shit and underdeveloped
• Inequality of development, amenities, and pay between Dublin and everywhere else gets worse every year.
• We’ve failed to build a solid bedrock of homegrown companies to replace the fragile reliance on MNC employment and corporate taxes.
• Pension age bomb is still ticking

I maintain that low corporate taxes are, unfortunately, crucial for underdeveloped nations to have any hope of investment coming to their shores. It sucks, but it massively contributed to Ireland crawling out of desperate poverty. And we never did anything sustainable with that good fortune, to say nothing of being too scared of them leaving to not reset the tax rate to something fairer now that we have other benefits for MNCs beyond low taxes (eg: we’re one of the most well educated countries in the world now). If US giants leave Ireland, there’s gonna be a shitton of unemployed people and we don’t have anywhere internally for them to take their expertise.

Edit: None of this, BTW, says the EU shouldn’t smack them hard as a counter. Out government has fucked us with decades of “ah sure it’ll be grand”. No reason the whole EU should be held back just for us.

The EU will be held back in this because those same corps have immense political weight more than anything tbh.

Y’know, I’m surprised it took him this long to start directly targeting the Dems with his BS. Step one of removing any opposition: starve them out.

I shudder to think what damage he can do in the 3 and a half years remaining in his term. :/