How could we be? We're not a post-colonial power like France or Germany who spent years exploiting the African continent in egregious human rights violations. It is literally only since 2021 that we have reached our pre-English Genocide population levels of 1851
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/aug/31/ireland-popula...
Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has.
As for us dragging ourselves up, that has more to with our special relationship with the US. The EU were initially helpful with infrastructural development, access to a Common Market, and to drag us out of the Vatican Law era, but we gave up a huge amount of fishing rights to do so - massively enriching spain, portugal and france who had overfished their own waters. Note also we're not part of Schengen, but maintain a CTA (Common Travel Area) with the UK.
Eventually the EU took the legs out from under us in 2008 and forced us at gunpoint to bail out unsecured german bondholders to maintain the integrity of the Euro and prevent a contagion run on German Banks.
Irelands FDI sector was highly developed in the late 80s and combined with entities like Enterprise Ireland - ranked first in the world of venture capital investors by deal count in 2020 - hammered home the advantage via our highly-educated English speaking workforce and relatively low cost of living. Even now the number of investments completed by Enterprise Ireland was 42% more than its nearest competitor, French sovereign wealth fund Bpifrance.
Germany was never a significant colonial power and did not extract much value from them. Especially not compared to Spain, Portugal, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands or Belgium.
> Germany has 20x our population, France is not far off it. Neither has anything close to the job market per capita in the IT and Services sector that Ireland has.
If you say so. And yet those employees are payed less.
These jobs exist because Ireland gave US companies large tax breaks and because it is an English-speaking country. Otherwise they would perhaps been based in the UK before Brexit.
It's good that Ireland attracts business, but encouraging tax dodging is not the way and this particular judgement is an opportunity to acknowledge this.
The commission has caved to political pressure and has fabricated a state aid case. The original general court ruling was unequivocal.
This ruling has been overturned by the ECJ - absolutely shamefully; with the entirety of their case is that Apple, and Apple alone were the beneficiary of state aid. That is demonstrably untrue.
So according to you everyone is wrong, all the courts, all the other EU countries (which unjustly are wealthier than Ireland due to colonialism), the commission and the court and of course the decision taken by it.
That's primarily due to EU politics and support.
It is, however, economically nowhere even close to France or Germany, no matter how large you think the "tech job" market there is [0].
> If any one of our EU or the other non EU countries were really dissatisfied with Ireland, they have the right to withdraw at any time.
Who should withdraw from what?
[0] For the facts regarding economic strength, read this document by the central bank of Ireland. https://www.centralbank.ie/docs/default-source/publications/...