{"id":790902,"date":"2026-10-03T18:00:26","date_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/790902\/"},"modified":"2026-10-03T18:00:26","modified_gmt":"2026-10-03T18:00:26","slug":"tax-rich-ireland-at-one-remove-from-debt-zeitgeist-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/790902\/","title":{"rendered":"Tax-rich Ireland at one remove from debt zeitgeist \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Ireland, 15 years ago, was Europe\u2019s austerity poster boy. The export-driven Celtic Tiger economy had come undone. The banking system was bust and the then government, controlled by a troika of creditors, was forced into implementing a swingeing series of cutbacks.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Ireland was the zeitgeist of the financial crash period. Everything bad about it played out here. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Fast forward 15 years and we now find ourselves at one remove from the debt and fiscal troubles infecting most of our peer group, largely because of windfall corporation taxes and an economy that is still growing strongly despite the international headwinds.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph b-it-article-body__interstitial-link\">[\u00a0<a aria-label=\"Open related story\" class=\"c-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.irishtimes.com\/budget\/\" rel=\"noreferrer nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Budget 2027: All you need to knowOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Contrast that with the UK or the US or France, where mounting public debt and elevated inflation are pushing bond yields, which determine everything from car loans to mortgages, higher and higher.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Bank of Ireland yesterday upgraded its growth forecast for the economy on the back of what it said was \u201cresilient consumer spending and the AI-related investment cycle\u201d.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">The bank revised up its forecast for modified domestic demand, a bespoke measure for growth here, to 3.8 per cent for 2026, reflecting what it said was the strength of AI-related investment in ICT and other machinery equipment, which rose by 37 per cent to \u20ac8 billion in the first half of 2026. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">\u201cFDI [foreign direct investment] into Ireland is also benefiting, evident in recent announcements from Intel, Anthropic and OpenAI amongst others,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">While warning that elevated inflation, which is now expected to rise to 4 per cent in the final months of 2026, would keep the price squeeze on households, Bank of Ireland\u2019s assessment is more upbeat than downbeat.<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"\" class=\"c-image audio_image\" src=\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/1784803479672-9ae96ac7-c636-4bcb-998c-c0aedcc60931.jpeg\"\/>Ireland\u2019s economic outlook ahead of Budget 2027 and agentic AI going rogue<\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">It forecasts consumer spending growth would moderate to 1.8 per cent this year because of inflation, while noting this was \u201cstill positive and a sharper expansion than expected in the UK and European countries\u201d. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">Job creation (1.5 per cent), pay growth (3.5 per cent) and the \u20ac1.5 billion of tax cuts planned in Budget 2027 will help real household incomes to grow despite inflation, it said. <\/p>\n<p class=\"c-paragraph paywall \">This time around, we seem to be residing outside the financial zeitgeist of debt and fiscal constraint.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ireland, 15 years ago, was Europe\u2019s austerity poster boy. The export-driven Celtic Tiger economy had come undone. The&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":790903,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[84,43932,1294,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-790902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-cantillon","tag-economy","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=790902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/790902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/790903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=790902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=790902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=790902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}