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Comment by ciupicri | Hacker News Reader

I was under the impression that Ireland is/was the Celtic tiger (of Europe).

A lot of US companies put their HQ in Ireland because, they speak English (mostly), they have very low corporation tax and lots of golf courses - the Irish government also did an excellent job of marketing Irish-American links.

Unfortunately as soon as the EU cracked down on the corporation tax scams, eastern europe became cheaper and US companies cut back on golfing holidays they realized they didn't actually have an economy. But it was a great place to work for 10years - as long as you didn't buy a house!

Most of those companies have pretty large complexes in Ireland. Intel has 2 fabs, Google has a large (for Dublin) office complex as their HQ and MS has their own campus.

As far as tax havens go we actually had quite a lot of people from those companies employed, it wasn't just your standard shell company running out of a solicitors office.

Google makes £1.25 billion/year in the UK but doesn't pay any tax because it's HQ is in Ireland, in Australia it makes a loss on $1Bn sales because it's all charged back to Dublin.

MSFT, Dell and HP both apparently lose money on all sales in Europe except those in Ireland.

I'm not arguing that American companies aren't taking advantage of this. All I'm saying is that they aren't just shell companies setup in Ireland. There are Eastern European countries with lower corporate tax rates, if the only reason they were in Ireland was the tax break they would have upped and left year ago. The only reason they are still there is because they actually have infrastructure and campuses.

Was is the correct tense there. The current round of bank bailouts have been pretty crippling. We aren't quite Iceland or Greece but we are up to our necks in debt.

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