Ireland Offshore

Published on Tuesday, November 02nd, 2004
Offshore Investment » Offshore Tax Havens

Summary: Ireland is one of the Member States of the EU - and yet Ireland has successfully remained offshore! How does it achieve and maintain this dichotomy?

Ireland OffshoreDiscussing the concept of Ireland as an offshore tax jurisdiction.

Ireland is one of the Member States of the EU - and yet Ireland has successfully remained offshore! 

How does it achieve and maintain this dichotomy?

It is obvious that EU membership has enabled Ireland to massively regenerate and reinvent itself!  From European back water - pretty but no player - Ireland became the fastest-growing EU state.

So how then can Ireland combine complete EU commitment with total commitment to remain offshore and to even beat Jersey at its offshore game?

Ireland’s economy was heavily dependant on its agriculture but the Irish Government has cleverly diversified its economy through a series of measures to promote foreign investment and to promote ‘Ireland offshore’ as a concept.

Furthermore, as Britain continues to tiptoe around the edges of full EU membership, Ireland is the only English speaking member of the European Union, making it very interesting to US firms interested in ‘getting into Europe’ and making it very interesting to the EU community as a whole for promoting inward investment across all EU countries.

Some of the main Ireland ‘offshore’ and tax friendly measures used by the Irish government to attract inward investment include: -

  • The ‘10% manufacturing rate of tax’ - which is actually applied quite freely both in and out of manufacturing.
  • The ‘Shannon Airport Free Zone’
  • The ‘International Financial Services Centre’ or IFSC in Dublin - which is aimed at attracting banks, insurers, mutual funds and the securities industry.

The latter two measures both offer 10% tax rates.

These measures, coupled with Ireland’s high-tech investment boom have succeeded in attracting many companies - particularly from the US - who are interested in entering Europe.

The country has successfully managed to resolve differences it had with the EU over offshore regimes whilst making sure the regimes remain attractive.  And Ireland has retained its attraction as a favoured destination of foreign companies entering the EU market-place, and the new EU enlargement can only reinforce this trend.

Page 1 of 1