The Irish Bailout and our Dublin-based startup.
I think it may be important to address the question of The Republic of Ireland’s bank solvency here. As you are probably aware, Ireland’s ruling Fianna Fail party was forced to accept a massive IMF / EU / ECB loan in order to keep Ireland’s banking system from collapsing. This in no way affects our start up, or the Irish government’s resolve — and ability — to continue a policy of supporting innovative companies. Quite the contrary, the Irish government, IMF and ECB all view innovation as a key to driving exports within Ireland. The European press has been filled with reports of the major EU countries “opportunistically” calling for adjusting tax levels in Ireland in order to bring them into alignment with the rest of Europe. The prime minister has rightly called this a “line in the sand” and makes a convincing argument that the Irish corporate tax structure is directly responsible for 250 million euros in tax revenues collected this year — revenue completely due to the low-tax’s ability to attract major industry layers such as Dell, IBM, Facebook, Zynga, Google, Microsoft, etc. For this revenue alone, the Irish government is justified in its commitment to maintaining their low tax status.
2PaperDolls is definitely working a contrarian stream here: Office space, skilled employees, and living expenses are very low in Ireland at the moment, in spite of Ireland’s being the European technical support and distribution hub for most American companies. And we’d all profit by recalling that, despite the current market perturbations, Ireland has spent a decade doubling down on technical investments in cloud computing infrastructure, with capacity barely tapped. So, superb capacity, along with a blessedly cool environment (lower temperatures mean less cost in maintaining massive server farms) equals lower cost for superior cloud infrastructure. For web service providers, communication companies and just about any business with a pulse, this lower costs provides a competitive advantage. Especially if one’s targeted market is outside Ireland, such as the USA, Continental Europe or (gasp) China.
Plus, I have gotten to know the folks running Enterprise Ireland’s effort during a prolonged “due-diligence”: they are an impressive lot. We look forward to working with them.
This is why we’re still committed to moving our start up to Dublin early next year.
Louis Ravenet, CEO
