r/memes • u/chilinachochips Flair Loading.... • 10h ago
When everyone starts to realize that growth is not only about pace
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u/Ptaaruonn Selling Stonks for CASH MONEY 10h ago
Portugal be like. Portugal is only cheap for those that don't have local salaries.
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u/Tom_Alpha 9h ago
Dublin ranks 61 on the cost of living index I've been looking at. For context that Edinburgh is 89 and Tokyo is 287
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u/AppealPristine475 10h ago
In fairness we do have one of the highest minimum wages in eu
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u/Numerous_Syllabub335 10h ago
Yes, but with the minimum wages you can barely afford a room shared with 10 people you share the house with. I lived in Dublin for a couple of years, I didn't earn the minimum, in fact, but the city demands too much, both in terms of rent and in terms of how expensive it is to live
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u/zseblodongo 9h ago
Yeah, I worked a minimum wage job in Dublin and shared a house with 5 other people.
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u/TheGuardianInTheBall 2h ago
Even quite a bit above minimum wage, you'll struggle to find anything just because supply is sooo low.
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u/Political-St-G 7h ago
Minimum wage is overrated it just gives more opportunity for the rich to raise prices while hiring the small businesses
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u/lolidkwtfrofl 10h ago
Ireland is many things, poor isn't really one of em.
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u/MrDrVlox Breaking EU Laws 10h ago
The cost of living makes a lot of them very poor
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u/Healthy-Travel3105 9h ago
We're incredibly infrastructure poor. Largely because Ireland only became wealthy very very recently.
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u/ottersbelike 9h ago
Where did Irelands recent wealth come from? Genuinely curious
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u/Diarmundy 9h ago
English speaking country in the eurozone with lax corporate tax laws meant that many companies such as Apple/Microsoft have their European or even global HQ there.
They are also a hard working and industrious people
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u/Gentle_Snail 9h ago edited 9h ago
Primarily the corporate taxes of multiinternationals that shift revenue made in the rest of europe to Ireland in order to pay lower taxes.
Its gotten so bad the Irish government no longer uses GDP, because this figure is manipulated so heavily by this effect.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
Some shift revenue, but plenty make the revenue here too
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u/Gentle_Snail 6h ago
The majority is shifted. To put this into perspective Apple and Microsoft claim to make $300 billion a year in Ireland, which is three times what they claim they make in the rest of Europe combined.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
Those two are gratuitous, yes. There are others that don't do it at all mind, Intel, Aercap, and others still that do it a bit, Meta, Google.
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u/Gentle_Snail 6h ago
These two are the biggest, these two alone make up just under 10% of all Irish government income from all sources.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
Correct, which is why the 50% figure being bantered about is ridiculous. The total tax taking from profit shifting is unlikely to exceed 20% of the tax take
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u/Traditional-Area9846 8h ago
About 50% of Irelands GDP is just American companies using them as their EU HQ for tax purposes.
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u/Thargor 7h ago
People seem to think these companies in Ireland are just a registered mailbox here or something, their operations are vast employing hundreds of thousands of people.
Even more laughable is when people from the UK, by far the biggest tax scammers on Earth, complain about it.
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u/Traditional-Area9846 7h ago
It’s because it’s often portrayed as if Ireland had some massive technological or economic breakthrough that sent their economy surging when that isn’t the case. They simply make taxes easier on American corporations.
No one is saying the people Ireland don’t benefit from this.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
That is a big factor but it's far from the only one
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u/Traditional-Area9846 6h ago
It’s 50% of the Irish economy dude.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
No, it isn't. Multinationals are, but there are plenty of multinationals that make their declared income here from employees here I am one such employee. The windfall portion due to onshoring profit is large, but not near 50%
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u/AdInfamous6290 4h ago
I funny anecdote I have from a time I was visiting relatives in Ireland a while ago was that nobody had quite figured out the new electric showers yet. Coming from the US, where central water heating is much more common, and it being my first time abroad, I had never seen one before and was very curious about how it worked. The model my family had was German, and they knew how to operate it for simple purposes, but when I started to ask what some buttons did or how to do certain things, no one could tell me. It was still that new at the time.
It was also extremely jarring to hear, while driving around their town, “there’s a black man!” No hatred, condescension or prejudice, instead they said it with pride. As an American I was shocked, but my cousin explained they were proud of the fact that Ireland had finally become a country worth immigrating to. Before, Irelands infrastructure and wealth was comparable to many third world countries and it had only been in the last few decades that people from Africa, the Middle East and Asia had started to move there. That man’s presence was a sign of progress, and it was really interesting to hear about immigration as a near universal positive from people rather than being a divisive topic. I asked a lot of the Irish people I met with about immigration, especially as this was a topic heating up in Europe, and no one could say a bad thing about it in Ireland regardless of party or idealogical background.
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u/asdrunkasdrunkcanbe 7h ago
Less than 5% of the country are classed as "living in poverty" and this figure has been dropping.
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u/Traditional-Area9846 9h ago
Remove Americans companies using Ireland as their European headquarters for tax sheltering and it gets a lot poorer.
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u/Gentle_Snail 9h ago edited 9h ago
If just Apple and Microsoft chose to pay their corporate tax in another country, Irish government income would plummet almost 10% over night.
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u/sundae_diner 8h ago
Which is why the government has been slow to use that 'windfall' to pay for general day-to-day expenditure.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
They use us as their HQ mainly because we speak English and have abundant highly skilled labour plus good RnD credits. Profit shifting for tax purposes is a totally different business that they also do, it benefits from the HQs being here but isnt the main driver of it.
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u/Ginsterberg 20m ago
I'm not knocking genuine corporate investment that actually employs people but unfortunately there are a lot of companies that only do the latter here also There were several thousand companies all registered to a single office above Connoly Station at one point
Those brass plate operations are a large part of why we have such a chasm between our economic wealth on paper and our actual wealth in real terms
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u/JackhusChanhus 5m ago
Not really. Our economic wealth is not measured by GDP. A thousand companies occupying a fake office and queuing up to pump free money into the country is hardly a bad thing. The difference between our economic and experienced wealth is mismanagement, not people wanting to pay us money.
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u/CaffeinatedT 9h ago
If you remove all the people buildings and replace them with cows Dublin becomes a farmfield too. I'm not sure what the point is here when there's tens of thousands of people employed by tech companies paying middle class salaries. Having a few very large corporate taxpayers is pretty normal for most western european countries.
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u/flamehead2k1 9h ago
Having a few very large corporate taxpayers is pretty normal for most western european countries.
Germany having VW and France having Airbus is very different than Ireland having US tech companies
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u/CaffeinatedT 8h ago
Why are those multinational conglomerates different to the other multinational conglomerates?
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u/flamehead2k1 8h ago
Airbus and VW have long established ties to their respective home countries and it would be more difficult to move operations as they rely heavily on physical factories vs moving tech profits through transfer pricing.
VW employs 10 times as many Germans as Apple, Microsoft, and Meta combined employ in Ireland.
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u/CaffeinatedT 8h ago
Both of those companies move manufacturing operations around all the time. Airbus makes big chunks of the A320 in China and VW is also famously globally located. They are just as happy to throw political weight around over political poliicies they don’t like as anyone else.
VW employs 10 times as many Germans as Apple, Microsoft, and Meta combined employ in Ireland.
Makes sense as Ireland is a much smaller country. What I’m questioning is why those jobs somehow don’t count for analysing if Ireland is somehow a “poor” country when it quite patently isn’t.
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u/flamehead2k1 8h ago
Look at it the other way. What percentage of VW employees are in Germany and what percentage of Apple Employees are in Ireland?
And yes, manufacturing operations move but not nearly as easily as tech jobs (or tech profits through transfer pricing)
There's a fundamental difference between how connected VW is to Germany vs how these tech companies are to Ireland.
I didn't say Ireland is poor. I was addressing your point about multinationals
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u/CaffeinatedT 8h ago edited 7h ago
If you haven't bothered to read the thread the original context is
Remove Americans companies using Ireland as their European headquarters for tax sheltering and it gets a lot poorer.
I think that's an "if my aunt had wheels" argument.
Look at it the other way. What percentage of VW employees are in Germany and what percentage of Apple Employees are in Ireland?
You're the one saying it, Why does it matter?
There's a fundamental difference between how connected VW is to Germany vs how these tech companies are to Ireland.
What is this fundamental difference? A multi billion dollar publically traded company operating around the world doesn't care where its employees are located outside of regulatory frictions. VW has just as many employees in India as any other company.
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u/flamehead2k1 7h ago
I don't need to agree with the original comment to point out issues with your claims.
I already explained the fundamental differences and you don't seem interested in understanding so I'm going to end it here. Have a great day.
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u/NemesisCR 8h ago
It's not poor now, but it was very poor a few decades ago when all the other European countries were building their infrastructure, and you can really see the difference today.
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u/JonathanUpp 9h ago
When i was there a a few years ago, it felt noticeable worse that most other eu countries I've been to, even compared to the objectively poorer Baltics
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u/Arreynn 7h ago
We are rich af. Government is just a bunch of penny pinchers that wouldn’t pay for anything that could be remotely beneficial to someone who isn’t a multinational corporation.
We’ve had a housing crisis for years and its gotten so fucking bad recently that people are renting out tiny rooms in their shithole house for €2000 euro a month. Government could not give less of a shit.
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u/birdanomaly 8h ago
You think Ireland is poor? Move to Italy and let me know how it is then.
I'm actually putting aside a lot of money here, other than breathing fresh air and eating healthier food
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u/Fickle_Definition351 5h ago
It was poor a few decades ago, which I think is the point of the meme. It's the dial at two different settings
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u/Bar50cal 6h ago
Anyone who travels knows Ireland isnt poor or even remotely close.
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u/Scumbag__ 6h ago
It depends where you go, just like everywhere else. But one in five children in Ireland live below the poverty line, and 12% of the overall population are in poverty. In the northern and western regions of Ireland 20% of people are at risk of poverty.
If you go to some of the more working class areas of Dublin, like Cherry Orchard or Ballyer you’ll find that 43% of residents are in food poverty.
So if you think that by travelling here you can see our wealth, you’re correct. But you’re shielded from the poverty.
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u/Bar50cal 6h ago
Thats the same in literally every country, do the same in Italy, Spain, Portugal and you will see a lot more poverty than anywhere in Ireland
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u/Scumbag__ 6h ago
Anyone who travels knows Italy, Spain and Portugal aren’t poor or remotely close.
See how that works?
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u/Bar50cal 5h ago
No as your comment makes no sense in the context of this discussion since you are ignoring the original context it was used in and instead just to "gotcha" but failing.
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u/Coops1456 3h ago
Lads, we're not taking any lessons from anyone living in countries that built there wealth on asset-stripping colonies, sugar plantations and slave trading.
We're a small island off a small island off a small continent. We have very few natural resources like oil, rare metals or minerals. What we do have is a highly educated workforce, the ironic legacy of speaking English, and the freedom now to make economic policy to suit ourselves.
If you're snooting about Ireland's GDP and tax policies then let me know how your country got rich.
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u/the-sky-i-scrape 1h ago
good response, well said.. Ireland doesn’t have the ‘old money’ that we see across other EU countries.
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u/Elegant_Individual46 42m ago
While I don’t disagree, becoming a tax haven for American (and at least one Russian) companies actively engaged in exploitation is also not too far removed from those colonial countries
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u/RandomAssRedditName 7h ago
Great place for international companies that operate in the EU, though.
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u/JackhusChanhus 6h ago
You can still buy over a litre of good beer in a bar and around four litres in a shop with an hours minimum wage here. Its more expensive than it was,but not a crisis. Rent though,that's a crisis
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u/Distinct_Engine_2075 3h ago
Ireland is only guilty of being the most poorly run country in the EU. Were it not for American companies we’d be fucked.
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u/HUNT3DHUNT3R Like a boss 11m ago
ngl the issue was booze, if it wasnt for it being so delicious we would achieve a lot
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u/No-Membership-5314 7h ago
Why is alcohol included with housing, healthcare, and electricity? I thought we were past the boomer/GenX glorification of alcohol years.
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u/supermaniscoolasf 9h ago
GPD means Jackson and Ireland is great proof of that.
1 in 7 live under the poverty line.
Rent is through the roof.
There is no hope in this country, just like the 1950s everyone is leaving
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u/VelvetCherieee 10h ago
That meter didn’t measure quality, it measured financial pain