Some irish background: About 30% of Irish GDP is "leprechaun economics." Funds that transfer through ireland without touching anything, and "would disappear if

Some irish background: About 30% of Irish GDP is "leprechaun economics." Funds that transfer through ireland without touching anything, and "would disappear if you tried to touch it." If you look up financial statistics that rely on gdp (eg oecd stuff), they're nonsensical. This isn't a normal "bidding for jobs" situation. We recently had an election that upended political norms. The two major parties (like US republicans and democrats) now have <50% of parliament seats. So they now collaborate, almost like a single party. They even negotiate with third parties (recently the greens) jointly. What tipped the balance was a "left wing wave." The largest party in this wave is Sinn Fein, a nationalist-republican party. Their campaign focused more on left wing issues than republican ones. In any case, this whole leprechaun economics thing is rarely mentioned. Ostensibly, the political turn should have turned on leprechaun economics. Almost no one mentioned it though. The benefit to Ireland isn't clear to me. Apple, Google, etc do have real operations here. They employ people and such. But, it's not clear how these relate to the tax evasion. I have never heard an explicit articulation or quantification of benefits. Politically, I think people just assume that it's beneficial because it's sneaky. A weird expression in irish chitchat is "say nothin!" It's part of a whole dialect (or kant) of gestures & phrases to communicate collusion. It's a part of irish culture, and it plays here. The upshot is that no one really understands why we have this system, but no one wants to give up the game by talking about it. $13bn is a lot of money here, about $3-$4,00 per person. It's shocking how little political debate we have on this... not even from those who want to spend this money.