LOOK, THE PHRASE ‘tax haven’ gets thrown around an awful lot these days. 

But what does it really mean to be tax haven, anyway? So what if the EU Tax Observatory’s own “Global Tax Evasion Report” explicitly identified Ireland as among the largest tax havens in the world “with over $140 billion shifted to each in recent years”? So what if our GDP has exploded since 2015 with almost zero tangible improvements made to the quality of life of the average person? Does that necessarily make us a tax haven? These things could be a natural phenomenon of some kind.

Some of the curmudgeons who can’t appreciate the nuances of the corporate tax system that saw us fight tooth and nail to keep €13 billion plus interest in taxes from Apple firmly out of our coffers may call us a tax haven, but the government has always seen things a little more maturely.

When the European Commission first announced its decision to take Ireland to court in order to get us to take the money that they said Apple owed us, then-Taoiseach Leo Varadkar called the decision “wholly unnecessary and unwarranted at this time”. In effect, it was the Irish impulse to insist upon paying for lunch taken to its ultimate extreme.

The matter was finally settled this week with the heartbreaking news that Ireland’s GDP was about to be boosted by the unwanted injection of somewhere in the region of €14 billion. Ireland will not get to keep all of this money, as it is expected that some other countries have a claim to some of it, but Minister for Finance Jack Chambers has confirmed that the bulk of the cash will remain in our accounts, and will arrive with the Exchequer in around six months.

Since the ECJ the ruling came in, the government has softened its cough on the idea that the Commission’s case was some wild intrusion, but maintains that there was no sweetheart deal in the arrangement that allowed Apple to pay less than 1% tax on its Irish earnings. The ECJ sees that differently, but that is quickly fading into the realm of the bygone. As business journalist Paul O’Donoghue wrote in The Journal this week, the government is now speaking of this deal as “a ‘historical’ arrangement which would never happen now.”

For eight years the story has strained the credulity of ordinary Irish people, who have been asked to perform the mental gymnastics required to accept that accepting €13 billion plus interest would in some way be bad for us – that the European Commission was the first ever parent to force a child to eat their dessert.

Apple’s Irish tax dispute is one of those glaring, glowering examples of something that seems straightforward to the average person but is touted as actually quite complicated by those in power. Then eight years go by, and it turns out it’s exactly as straightforward as we all thought it was to begin with. And also we’ve wasted €10 million on the legal costs. 

€10 million down the drain would be cause for outcry in any other case. Spending €10 million in order to avoid receiving a further €13 billion plus, however? That’s when you hit a tipping point from outcry into something more like mystification.

Naturally, the infographics are out in force and everyone with a Canva account is having fun highlighting what you could buy with €13 billion. 38,805 Leinster House bike shelters is one favourite. Others have divided €13 billion by the average Irish house price to demonstrate what the money could do for our housing crisis. On the face of it, such an enormous amount of money should represent a silver bullet for any one of Ireland’s many problems. With that amount of money, we might even be able to cover the eventual cost of the National Children’s Hospital.

Once again, we’re faced with something that seems simple that we will of course be assured is actually not. Yes, that money could be used to build houses. Yes, it could be used to buy and refurbish all of Ireland’s derelict and dilapidated houses. Yes, it could be used to plug any number of the gaps that have appeared in Ireland’s infrastructure since the the era of explicit austerity. 

There is, however, very little sense of optimism in Ireland that this money will translate to any improvement in overall quality of life. It has been made clear that the money will not affect the spending plans for Budget 2025, and Simon Harris has said that money will not be used on “day-to-day” spending. Indeed, the windfall has been described by Fortune Magazine as “an existential crisis… for an economy with more money than sense”. The money is like a monkey’s paw, a wish that comes with a terrible curse, more trouble than it’s worth. Sure we might get a Dublin Metro out of it, but at what cost? What will Amazon, Google and Salesforce think of us now?

The €14 billion lands atop an already Scrooge McDuck-like pile of money — a pre-existing budget surplus of €8.6 billion. The government is yet to indicate how that money will be spent, with suggestions that it could be funnelled into the rainy day fund to which we already commit €1 billion per year. Question: do the days get all that much rainier than a decade-long housing crisis? Surely by now we are positively slick with rain. We’re being pelted, lads. It’s absolutely lashing. 

It’s been a week of volte-face moments for Fine Gael, whose junior minister Neale Richmond this week adopted a position he once argued forcefully against: a significant increase in stamp duty paid by vulture funds. In January of this year, Richmond gave a comprehensive and detailed argument to the Dáil as to why an increase in this stamp duty from 10% to 17% would make not difference. His party are now pushing for the stamp duty to be doubled. Maybe that it’s that extra 3% that’s going to save us.

And hey, I get no more joy from writing about stamp duty than you do reading about it, but that’s the world we live in pal. If we’re ever going to get anywhere in this life we’re all going have to knuckle down and figure out the nature of the Ireland’s economy, so maybe next time we’ll understand why an influx of around €14 billion is actually a bad thing.