News

With only a month left for taxpayers to make voluntary disclosures about offshore assets, there’s likely to be a surge in calls to the Revenue Commissioners’ dedicated helpline in coming weeks. Revenue Commissioners said yesterday that about 2,000 calls have so far been made to its helpline, which was established after Finance Minister Michael Noonan […]

Labour costs in Ireland are rising at one of the slowest rates in the EU despite the country’s strong economic performance. Ireland is currently the fastest-growing economy in western Europe, yet the latest data from Eurostat shows that wage costs in the country rose by just 1.1pc in the last three months of last year. […]

Ireland is one of the countries “leading the race to the bottom” in the facilitation of global tax avoidance, according to a new report from charity group Oxfam. Oxfam said there “is strong evidence” that Ireland is aiding significant corporate-tax-avoidance schemes for European banks. In a report titled ‘Opening the Vaults’, researchers at Oxfam, in […]

Irish-based companies are among the biggest foreign owners of UK firms, ahead of Japan and well ahead of rising powerhouse China. More than one-in-four of the UK’s most important businesses are foreign owned, according to figures from the UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS). The data shows as many as 24,145 UK businesses are owned […]

The price of an average semi-detached house in parts of Dublin is inflating as fast as in the boom years and the period immediately before the Central Bank introduced its lending restrictions two-and-a-half years ago. Prices in North County and South County Dublin both increased by 5.6pc in the three months since December, while Dublin […]

Public sector workers get paid 40pc more on average than their private sector counterparts, a report claims. By contrast, in the UK public sector pay is almost on a par with the private sector, with Ireland’s public/private pay gap high by European standards, the paper states. The study by Davy Stockbrokers argues that any future […]

On Wednesday, the UK prime minister is scheduled to ­’trigger’ Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union to announce to the 27 other EU member states that the UK intends to leave the union. It will be no surprise. On June 23 last a majority of voters in the UK and Gibraltar voted in […]

Ireland’s application for membership of the China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB) has been formally approved. Ireland is one of 13 applicants to the new Beijing-based international financial institution whose membership was approved yesterday. It is the first time the AIIB has welcomed new members since it inception, the multilateral financial institution said. The approved […]

Euro-area lenders took €233.5bn in free long-term loans from the European Central Bank as they prepare for the potential end of extraordinary stimulus. The take-up in the last of the ECB’s Targeted Longer-Term Refinancing Operations (TLTROs) – four-year loans at a rate that starts at zero and could go lower – compares with a median […]

The pound jumped yesterday after retail sales in the United Kingdom beat expectations, despite rising inflation. It comes just days after it was announced that inflation in the UK crashed through the Bank of England’s 2pc target last month, pushed up by rising food and fuel prices. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) […]