Dropbox is going brogue

Aontaím leat!

Though, these days, the median wage in Ireland is actually substantially higher than in the UK.

I said "India of Europe"... I was in Dublin last week. Compared to Milan, Paris, London or even Manchester, the Irish cost of living today is much lower. I know quite a few people who moved to Dublin to work in IT, then bounced off to England looking for higher wages.

Of course it's not India, it's still an European country with a noticeable welfare state, but I'd argue that you won't find better English speakers for the same amount of money anywhere in Europe.

no.

I'm not suggesting that is why Dropbox are moving to Ireland. I'm saying that if that was the reason as brought up by the OP then they should be aware of current events in the UK where companies like Amazon are making billions of pounds in the UK and paying virtually no tax - even though they use our roads and infrastructure to conduct their business.

They're not expanding to Ireland. That's the point. Now they route all transactions from non-US customers through the Irish subsidiary and keep their money over there. They pay up 15% or whatever the tax rate is instead of the 35% over here. They keep the profits there waiting for a tax holiday, then move the money back when that happens. They can probably even claim the 15% as a foreign tax credit during the tax holiday.

Pretty simple. :)

While not illegal, it's a little bit dodgy. But it's what everyone does these days, so why not?

"Is there a chance, given the public's hostile reaction to the bank bailouts and economic crisis, that Ireland could tack left and start rolling back its advantageous tax rates?"

It won't be the public's hostile reaction that will raise Irish taxes, but EU pressure.

The public loves the tax rates, because of announcements like this. Creating jobs is what stimulates the economy, and the tax lost from corporate tax shenanigans are more than made up for by the creation of thousands of jobs from US multi-nationals setting up shop in Dublin.

Capital Gains Tax: I'm not a tax lawyer but there's good advice here: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/en/money_and_tax/tax/capit...

Morale wise, again I don't know. I'm currently out in India but when I left 6 months ago there was (I think) a sense of just shrugging the shoulders and getting on with life. At this point, more scandals, bailouts & controversies would just be adding to the pile. People will complain but there won't be any kind of mass movement in protest. We voted out the political party who were in power during the boom years and I see now that they're back to the second most popular party in the country.

I know a lot of young, very talented people don't see a future for themselves in the country, don't see the point in trying to fix a very conservative system and just leaving (this would be why we have a relatively low unemployment rate compared to say, Spain).

The only way we'll roll those rates back is if the EU forces the changes. The public aren't angry with companies or multinationals. They're angry with private banks, a government which made private debt public on the insistence of the EU and with the EU which is forcing extreme hardship to repay other EU banks. Please note, I'm not saying the people or the Irish government is not culpable for the current crisis - particularly the banking regulator - but rather just trying to outline what the public see as being the problem.

I posted this comment on Reddit a while back in response to another person's question, trying to sum up the whole situation with the Irish bank bailout (a bit wordy and a bit of a rant I'm afraid, but hopefully informative).

The former Irish Minister for Finance, Brian Lenihan (now deceased), was coerced into putting together a dodgy back-room deal on the night of September 29 2008 where all senior Irish bank debt was guaranteed. So the Irish state was on the hook for all the insane property development loans that went on during the boom years. This single, disastrous meeting is the reason Ireland is fucked. The country ran budget surpluses up til that point. A misleading report from Merrill Lynch London office and some bullshit from senior Irish bank chiefs ensured that the deal was done.

You can read the full story here: http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/03/michael-... There was a separate piece of legislation enacted so that depositor's funds would be guaranteed up to the value of €100,000. The bank debt write down and the depositor's guarantee could've easily been done separately, but the Minister's hand was forced.

There was an article about it a little while ago shich i cant dig up, but relatively, your obligations were HUGE

Absolutely staggering proportions. Before this nonsense started in 2008, our Government debt-to-GDP ratio was ~80% - high but sustainable, afterwards it skyrocketed to 120% (unsustainable). The only other economies in this territory were Iceland, who reneged on their obligations, and Greece, who will restructure as sure as night follows day. Also before 2008, the country ran budget surpluses, it's not like the country was fiscally irresponsible like Greece.

Is that still the case? Have things gotten angrier at all recently, or is this just a quiet resolution and no one is protesting much?

What happened was we booted out the political party who were responsible for the mess - they were in bed with property developers (got political donations etc) and so did nothing to keep the construction sector in check, resulting in an out of control property bubble. When the recession kicked in, we elected in another coalition of 2 different political parties - the MAIN promise of theirs in the run up to the election was to "burn the bondholders". They utterly failed in this regard. Irish politicians are little bitches who want to be seen as "good little Europeans" and get a pat on the head from the big boys in Brussels (EU seat of power). There's no sense of saying "fuck it, we're not taking this shit, the Irish people deserve better". The injustice of the way this mountain of debt is being heaped on the people, forced to bail out our retarded banks and getting austerity on top of that is unbelievably galling. I heard that a trader on the west coast of America made something like $700m on betting that the Irish government would 'honour' our debt. Ridiculous. People are extremely angry underneath the surface. In Ireland, we tend to bottle up the rage instead of the riots you see in the southern European countries. What will happen is my generation (I'm 25) will largely emigrate to the UK, Australia and Canada. Some will eventually return, more won't. That is the traditional Irish "valve" to release the pressure - emigration, not riots.

The loss of sovereignty is a massive blow to the Irish psyche. There's an old cliche in Ireland - "700 years of oppression", i.e. alluding to the fact that we were under the thumb of British royalty for centuries. The first real taste of serious wealth that Ireland had in it's free history, and it was pissed away by our own corrupt politicians, and now Berlin and Brussels gets to dictate what we do.

Having said all that, many people are too comfortable and non-activist for anything crazy to happen, like forcing the government to write off the property gambling debts, riots, or leaving the Euro-area. I do think the Irish state will be forced to write down some/all of the debt eventually, as we can't export fast enough to grow GDP to pay off the debt. I kind of wish people would freak out, go fucking ballistic and get this shit sorted quickly (the debt that is), cos we're a great little nation and there's some great factors we have in our favour (young, english speaking workforce, highly educated, pro-business, really low corp. tax, etc.) that would mean the economy would quickly take off again if we could get this fucking debt off our back.

Irish isn't actually available as a translation for Dropbox - they only provided an Irish translation for the announcement on that page.

Irish person here, I can't speak much Irish and I cannot think of a situation that would ever require me to, since leaving school (though since I live in San Francisco now, its even more unlikely).

We're required to learn Irish throughout school (all the way til we finish secondary school), and even need to pass Irish exams to get into university.

Government business can be done in Irish, but its very rare. When you see it at the top-level, like in parliament, its almost always done for effect.

In actual census (2011) numbers, it's 15,000 Chinese speakers (presumably as a grouping) and 1.7 million Irish speakers, 110,000 of whom speak it on a weekly basis outside of education.

The number of Polish speakers just about beats Irish with almost 120,000.

Gaelic is compulsory for both primary and secondary school which means that almost everyone will study it between the ages of 5 and 16 (minimum school leaving age). It says something about our approach that all but a very small minority of school leavers are effectively unable to hold a conversation in the language.

It's been compulsory since the formation of the Irish state during that time the percentage of actual spoken Irish (as well as general Irish comprehension) has continually dropped. Given that the actual aim of this was to promote the language I think it's safe to say it's been an unmitigated disaster.

My personal take on this (I went to an all Irish primary school so I was fluent) is that there's two factors here:

1 - The way it's taught is absolutely terrible. There's a focus on the grammar and structure of the language rather than actually speaking it. This means that students associate it with memorizing genitive and dative cases which is pretty boring. This means the student don't like it. Some of those students grow up to be the teachers, and they've got a negative attitude to the language. Wash, rinse repeat for 90 years and you get to where we are now.

2 - There's no economic incentive to learn the language. Unless you're living in a gaeltacht (nearly all in very rural areas) you're almost never actually going to be able to use it. It's not present in any other country and apart from having conversations which foreigners can't understand, isn't useful. There are reasons to learn it but they're cultural or academic rather than practical.

There are signs of regrowth with more and more all Irish schools popping up but my impression is that it's become a middle class status symbol to be able to speak the language so we'll see what happens there. There's also been discussion about reforming the syllabus to split it into conversational Irish (compulsory) and 'academic' Irish (optional)

As for dealing with the government, you're permitted (not obligated) to conduct all of your business with officials through Irish and demand that they do the same with you. We have two versions of our constitution, one in Irish and one in English. In the case of any discrepancies, the Irish one takes precedence.

the Taoiseach (prime minister) is pronounced something like "Teshar" (with a kind of 'gutural' r at the end)

Try tee-shock and you will be pretty close to the standard.