Overview

The Emerald BargainIreland and the Tax That Changed the World In the late 1950s, Ireland made a decision that would reshape the global tax system. Facing mass emigration, agricultural poverty, and a government that could barely pay its bills, a small group of civil servants decided to offer the world a deal: come here, invest here, and we will tax your profits less than anywhere else in the English-speaking world. The deal worked. Ireland went from one of the poorest countries in Western Europe to one of the wealthiest. Apple, Google, Meta, and dozens of the world's most profitable companies built their European operations in a country the size of Indiana. In 2024, Ireland's Revenue Commissioners collected 107 billion roughly 19,000 per person from a population of five and a half million. Then the world decided the deal had gone too far. The Emerald Bargain tells the full story: from the Famine tax that made income taxation feel like colonial extraction, through the revolutionary Dáil that ran a parallel tax system during the War of Independence, to T.K. Whitaker's 1958 transformation, the Celtic Tiger, the Apple ruling that ordered Ireland to collect 14 billion it had argued it did not owe, and the OECD's global minimum tax that is now rewriting the terms of the original bargain. At its centre is one of the strangest episodes in modern fiscal history: a government fighting in court for years against the recovery of fourteen billion euros not out of greed, but out of a principled, legally defensible, and widely misunderstood argument about what the rules actually said. Accessible, argued, and told with the full cast of characters Whitaker and Lemass, Tim Cook and Margrethe Vestager, the Dáil tax collectors and the OECD negotiators The Emerald Bargain is the story of the smallest country with the largest footprint in the history of international taxation. Volume V of The Taxation Series

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