The country is a tax vessel, nothing more, remove the megacorps offices with barely any local businesses as well as the plane registrations and they drop right back somewhere bellow the average gdp per capita of europe.
Ireland economy is 85% services, compare that to Germany's 68%
Germany has the Rhine and is the centre of the continent, and also has the Marshall Plan boost post 1950 for their infrastructural development. Ireland is an Island whose population only hit pre-famine levels in the last 3 years.
Of course our economy is going to skew heavier service based! How are you going to ship cars and heavy industrial goods from Ireland to the rest of the EU and compete with Germany or France on shipping, raw materials etc..?
If you can't be intellectually honest and accept that Ireland would be a fraction of what it is without its tax evasion system idk what to say, there is literally not a single source that will tell you otherwise, even their own official reports mention that it is the case.
When 25% of your GDP comes for a single foreign company with 6000 employees in your country it's time to raise an eyebrow, especially when the facility's job is to assemble "made to order" computers (like the dude at the corner of my street).
> The "multinational tax schemes" used by some of these multinational firms contribute to a distortion in Ireland's economic statistics; including GNI, GNP and GDP
> A particularly dramatic growth in Ireland's 2015 GDP (from 1% in 2013, to 8% in 2014, to 25% in 2015) was shown to be largely driven by Apple restructuring their double Irish subsidiary
We don't use GDP because we're not a bloody Coal and Steel Union in the 1950s, we're a Service based economy in a Globalised marketplace.
We use Modified GNI (GNI*) - GNI minus the depreciation on Intellectual Property, depreciation on leased aircraft and the net factor income of redomiciled PLCs - which accounts for almost all of what you're citing bar some more egregious BEPS tools which are closed for years.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ireland-gdp-growth-multinati...
The country is a tax vessel, nothing more, remove the megacorps offices with barely any local businesses as well as the plane registrations and they drop right back somewhere bellow the average gdp per capita of europe.
Ireland economy is 85% services, compare that to Germany's 68%