Is Ireland's Tiger Economy under threat.

All I know is that

Blair and Brown went all out to fuck the small guy

Within weeks, I was getting emails and letters addressed to me as Director of my company, using the details held at companies house, sent on behalf of the Irish prime minister, telling me that I was facing 42% taxation if I stayed in England and Wales but I could enjoy 10% corporation tax and far more beneficial personal tax by opening a bricks and mortar office in the irish republic and transferring my accounting operations and company banking facilities to the republic

Within six months Oracle, Microsoft, IBM and a dozen software companies I had accounts with had moved to Ireland. Software updates, Action packs and releases came to me from the southern counties of the republic. Boeing moved their avionics development to Shamrock glen.

And within a year Ireland was in the grip of unbelieveable housing cost inflation.

Yeah. The original mailing was quite specific and in many ways quite ingenious

The UK government were screwing the little guy

The Federation of Small Business were at the time running a campaign for "The Right To Be Self Employed". It's a long story but basically unlike an employee, or an MD of a company, a self employed sole trader or partner has no legal status that decrees them to be in business on their own account. The Revenue can rock up at their leisure declare them and employee of their client and slap a tax demand for unpaid PAYE plus penalties plus fines on said client

This is the same crap Brown authorised with IR35.

The Irish saw through this and promised anyone thinking of trading as a close company or as a some trader the right to do so and substantially reduce their tax liability

I chose not to, but many of my colleagues took up the offer

Of course, when it got rolling a lot of big guys joined the party, but they were not the original target

Yeah, the Irish treasury were very insistent that their 10% scheme was only available to a business with a bricks and mortar presence in the republic.

I'm not convinced you had to move yourself there.

At the time, I had a sort of deal with fifteen of my fellow freelancers from my defence industry days. The stuff we worked on was done by our former employer who had long since gone bust.

Marconi asset stripped the wreckage and tried to get the Navy to use them for maintenance. The Navy said 'actually, we have the contact details of all the original developers as part of the vetting process' and after a few approaches we cottoned on, went to Naval Procurement and said 'if You like we'll rent an office and put someone in it, when you want anything done call us and we'll give you a price' and for years we split the 'sit by the phone' job between the wives of ten of us on a half day a week basis, using one of our clients to keep our clearance sponsorship for us in exchange for a discount on our rate if they needed something done

We WERE going to move the operation to Ireland and pay a fee each to the wife of one of our number when they took a full time job with Boeing near Shannon I believe it was, but Blair destroyed our ability to use our client to maintain our security status for us, hoping we'd then sell ourselves to his pals running the software houses, but we chose for the most part to dump government work and go out to the wider commercial market.

I made a fair bit out of banking and insurance particularly when brown changed his mind on what to tax every ten minutes. Several older than me retired early, sold up and pissed off.

The other side of the coin of course being it can be worthwhile, even fun. As I've said I wasn't there for very long, six months in fact, but I was in France working for France Telecom, off the back of the INMARSAT job, and I enjoyed it. I never saw any problems but I went there already able to hold my own in French, and improved in that regard quite quickly. I think the standard was set on day one when I got thrown a stack of papers to go through, and while I was filling them in, proceeded to swear under my breath exclusively in French. Largely thanks to the vocabulary I picked up from a bunch of French army blokes I was working alongside for a while on Salisbury Plain.

I think I was supposed to panic like hell when handed this lot and found there was no translation. That's how France did things back then, can't say if it still does. Not sure what they expected, probably weren't expecting me to just fill them in. But it certainly made it look like I came there prepared to 'become' French 😁😁

I know the French taxman was severely pissed off when I used an option to pay the UK taxman instead and claim dual taxation relief to tell the french to go screw themselves..I think my co workers at FT were SLIGHTLY jealous I swung that, assuming i'd done it to save money. The reality is it cost me somewhere around fifty quid MORE but alliw d me to tell the French taxman to go fuck themselves which was priceless.

My uncle and his fellow Merchant Navy officers who between them bought a villa in Spain in order to stay out of Maggie Thatchers tax claws all spoke Spanish because a lot of the crew on the ships did.

I've experienced the three price tags system in Egypt. There's one price for Egyptians, one price for non Egyptians working there and another way higher for tourists.

I remember at a bar I was handed a bill and paid it, but about a minute later the greasy git came running with a huge wad of Egyptian money. The little sod had charged me the tourist rate but I was over there as a dive master helping out a friend of a friend and should have got the 'workers' rate. He could have gone out of business very quickly if we'd put it about he pulled that stunt deliberately....