Support linked to concessions - Tax card in play in Brexit solidarity

Last weekend, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar retweeted a UN report which considered countries’ social and economic achievements.

Support linked to concessions - Tax card in play in Brexit solidarity

Last weekend, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar retweeted a UN report which considered countries’ social and economic achievements.

The UN rated Ireland fourth out of 189 countries as a place to live, 13 places higher than five years ago.

The online reaction to Mr Varadkar’s message was the usual mixture of blind, thoughtless aggression and ignorant harrumphing.

It was as if Mr Varadkar had suggested that only 13 people died in Costa Rican storms or that climate change was a folderol contrived by liberals with nothing better to do.

The faceless warriors’ tirades underlined how misleading online conversations can be — and what dangerous, anti-democratic platforms social media offers in this post-truth, post-shame age.

Those eruptions were predicated on the idea that the Taoiseach imagines this Republic complete or that he is unaware of the challenges facing us all.

The UN report did no more than offer objective context, the online bluster did not.

Against that background, it is chilling to imagine how social media might react if Mr Varadkar described what Ireland might look like if we were forced to increase taxes levied on multinational companies.

If that picture was coloured by changes that made it attractive for American companies to repatriate, then the online response is almost unimaginable.

Yet, this pincer movement may be gathering momentum. It is impossible to imagine what the White House might propose, especially as mid-term elections could, hopefully, reorder President Trump’s priorities.

However, it is not as easy to be sanguine about reports from Europe linking changes to corporation tax and an end to our veto on an EU digital tax and EU support on Brexit.

An unnamed EU official has been quoted as saying “solidarity doesn’t come for free”.

Unsurprisingly, Mr Varadkar is in nothing-to-see-here mode. If he is not to flag the possibility of concessions, he can say nothing else.

That does not mean he has forgotten the hard lessons learned eight years ago when ministers Noel Dempsey and Dermot Ahern confidently dismissed suggestions Ireland was about to accept an ECB bailout.

History also insists that a threat to link support for Ireland to an attack on our tax independence is all too probable. In 2011, French president Nicolas Sarkozy and German chancellor Angela Merkel painted Enda Kenny into that very same corner, demanding he concede on the 12.5% corporation tax rate.

Kenny, quiet, smiling Kenny, resisted and safeguarded a major tool in our recovery but it is unearthed every time we seek refuge in EU solidarity irrespective of guarantees enshrined in international treaties protecting our tax independence. Ireland’s weakness is the EU’s opportunity as it were.

We are caught between unhinged Brexiteers and hard-nosed Europeans who see Ireland as a tax haven and are happy to use the leverage offered by our comparative weakness to challenge a policy that allowed the UN rate us so highly.

This game of bluff and counterbluff may at first seem a test of our Government but it is also a high-wire test of how the EU treats its smaller, more peripheral members.

It is hard to think of a moment since we joined the EEC 45 years ago when the stakes were as high.

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