Ireland’s dirty little tax secret. Next month marks the centenary of the Easter Rising in Dublin, which helped set Ireland on its modern course. But in a land of secrets, who would have thought that seven years or so after the country had to be rescued from impending financial collapse, it would be one of the largest investors in the world in the safest of all assets, US government treasury bonds and notes? It’s all thanks to its tax-reducing deals with the likes of Apple, Starbucks and other multinational tax avoiders and minimisers, which use these deals to wash their profits from countries like Australia. The US Treasury said that in December 2015, Ireland had US$264.2 billion invested in US government Treasury securities.

By way of comparison, much larger Australia had just US$30.6 billion invested in US government treasuries at the end of 2015 — and our economy is more than six times the size of Ireland’s US$250 billion (GDP) economy. Ireland loves these US bonds and notes — the US Treasury report shows that Ireland lifted its holdings by a quarter over 2015, from US$201 billion in December 2014. Australia’s fell from US$34.5 billion, China’s was all but steady on the US$1.244 trillion, but Japan sold its holdings down from US$1.230 billion at the end of 2014. — Glenn Dyer

The Irish low-tax fiddle. You’d be entitled to ask how a small, rescued economy in the eurozone could manage to rack up such as large holding of the safest bonds in the world. The answer is the various tax deals the Irish government has done with the likes of Apple, Starbucks, Amazon and other mostly US multinationals over the years to allow them to route their foreign profits through Ireland to take advantage of the country’s generous corporate tax rates. And rather than send the cash home to the US to be taxed, these giants leave it offshore in safe, low tax havens like Ireland. For example, Apple had US$215.7 billion of cash and long-term investments on its books — and much of that is held in Ireland and in US treasuries.

The Irish economy has rebounded strongly from rescue thanks to the generous tax laws that facilitate offshore manufacturing, especially in pharmaceutical products, technology and financial services (such as funds management) and driven by the notional corporate tax rate of 12.5%. Ireland is really facilitating the draining of tax revenues from countries such as Australia, the US and the UK and allowing big American companies to hold their taxable profits offshore and invest in US government securities via the foreign arms of US and other banks (thereby helping to finance the continuing US budget deficits). — Glen Dyer

All this is of no benefit to the government. In the final three months of last year, the Irish economy grew 9.2% from same period last year — the strongest annual growth rate in 14 years. Quarter on quarter, the economy grew 2.7%. The country’s central bank had only estimated growth last year of 6.6% and growth through the year was just on 8%. Manufacturing grew 14.2%, building and construction 8.8% and personal consumption, which accounts for 55% of domestic demand, rose 3.5%. Unemployment was 8.8%, down from 10% at the start of 2015. It all sounds impressive and should have resulted in the government being re-elected in the national poll at the end of February — but the result was a hung parliament, with the government of Prime Minister Enda Kenny rejected by voters. He remains a caretaker PM until a new coalition can be negotiated. The Irish people still feel he financial impact of the rescue was really the rescue of the country’s broken, badly run banks, big property developers and other business people, and took it out on the government at the poll. — Glenn Dyer