Dublin Dubs Itself Europe's Tech Hub

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Like Google and Facebook before it, Twitter is opening an international office in Dublin. There's some debate over whether or not it will be a formal European headquarters, but Ireland is bragging about winning the battle over Europe's two other top tech towns, London and Berlin. The country's jobs agency, the Industrial Development Authority, broke the news in a tweet that started with a telling joke: "Ireland is trending."

It's true. Over the past few years, Ireland has worked hard and succeeded becoming Europe's tech hub. The Guardian reports that "IDA is trying to make Dublin the social media and online capital of Europe." Google helped start the trend by opening its international headquarters in Dublin in 2004. Others followed and Dublin now hosts hundreds of employees from Facebook, LinkedIn, Zynga, PayPal and eBay. Google alone has over 2,200 employees in Ireland's capital. But besides the adorable accents, what's the draw? "The simple fact of the matter is that Ireland remains a low-corporation tax country in Europe, and is in the top 10 of European countries in terms of ease of starting a business according to the World Bank," says Mike Butcher at TechCrunch Europe. "It's also English speaking, has a highly educated population and since the property bubble burst, it's much cheaper to locate an office there."

It's also cheaper for American companies to run their international operations in Ireland. At 12.5 percent, Ireland's corporate tax rate is less than half that of neighboring United Kingdom, but as The Guardian's Lisa O'Carroll explains that number is more of a red herring than real savings. Thanks to a strategy called the "Double Irish"--not to be confused with the continental version, the "Dutch Sandwich"--companies headquartered in Ireland benefit from the country's generously low "transfer pricing." Take Google for example. "The search engine is using Ireland as a conduit for revenues that end up being costed to another country where its intellectual property (the brand and technology such as Google's algorithms) is registered," O'Carroll reports. "In Google's case this country is Bermuda, according to an investigation by Bloomberg last year."

The Double Irish "very common at the moment, particularly with companies with intellectual property," Bloomberg reported last year. It's not hard to see why as Google trimmed their overseas tax rate down to 2.4 percent last year with the strategy, just one of many "international tax benefits that boosted its earnings by 26 percent last year." Of course, as policymakers--especially Irish ones--are careful to explain, there's nothing illegal about any of this. Furthermore "Ireland is not quite like Luxembourg," O'Carroll says. "Companies have to have fully blown operations in the country to take advantage of the tax-friendly arrangements."

None of this is to say that American accountants are happy about the habit. "[Google is] flying a banner of doing no evil, and then they’re perpetrating evil under our noses," professor emeritus of accounting at Baruch College Abraham J. Briloff told Bloomberg. "Who is it that paid for the underlying concept on which they built these billions of dollars of revenues? It was paid for by the United States citizenry."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Adam Clark Estes is a former writer for The Wire. He has also written for The Huffington Post and Vice.

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The former Breitbart editor’s attempt to schedule a provocative event on the liberal campus featuring high-profile conservative speakers didn’t work out as planned.

At first, conservative agitator Milo Yiannopoulos’s Free Speech Week in Berkeley, California, seemed like it might be a major event. Four straight days of provocative events on campus featuring right-wing luminaries, culminating with appearances by conservative writer Ann Coulter and former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon, and all in the heart of one of the most symbolically resonant places Yiannopoulos could have chosen: the campus of University of California, Berkeley, a campus with a longstanding image as a hotbed of left-wing activism where protests shut down an event of his last year.

But things didn’t go according to plan.

Speakers whose names appeared on initial schedules have either pulled out or said they were never planning to go; the campus publication Yiannopoulos is working with, The Berkeley Patriot, never reserved indoor school venues and appeared to pull out Friday afternoon; and Yiannopoulos announced on his Instagram a planned march through campus on Sunday in protest of Berkeley’s supposed clamp-down on free speech. “It’s time to reclaim free speech at UC Berkeley and send shockwaves through the American education system to every other college under liberal tyranny,” Yiannopoulos wrote in his post. The event would have been an important step in reviving Yiannopoulos’s wounded image on the right after a clip of him appearing to defend pedophilia caused him to be barred from CPAC and lose his job as a Breitbart editor in February. Earlier this week, Yiannopoulos told me in a text message that “We will fight until the last man is ejected from the last step on Sproul Plaza.”