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I dunno.. I think our corporate tax does have a lot, if not close to everything, to do with companies basing their European headquarters here (eg, see Double Irish/Dutch Sandwich [1]). Our spoken English isn't as amazing as you make it out to be (its certainly not bad, but best in the world?? besides, have you ever been to Cork ;-) or certain parts of Dublin for that matter...) and while the "free" fees certainly helped our education, I still feel our education is inferior to a lot of the rest of the world. For example, computer science-related courses are still not attracting as many students as it should, even though, here in Ireland, IT jobs are much more plentiful than others [2]. Of course, regardless of how great we think we are as a startup hub, I've seen very little focus on startups here. Besides the occasional startup weekend, nubie.ie and Enterprise Ireland (which, IMHO, isn't very useful to a lot of - if not most - Internet tech startups), I see absolutely nothing here that shows any kind of innovation or advancements in the way of startups. Which is a pity, because I think that would be a great start to improving the economic situation. university students majoring in "safe" subjects like arts, languages or business rather than mathematics and computer science Funnily (or sadly) enough, I think the "safe" subjects are the ones that are really feeling the full force of the economic problems, while jobs in sciences, from where I stand anyway, are reasonably plentiful (well, compsci anyway, I haven't paid much attention to others since they're not relevant to me personally). Even for those students majoring in compsci, they gear you towards getting a job, not starting your own company. Agreed. This is definitely the case here. I think its holding back our potential, but I don't know what could be done about it really. [1] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-10-21/google-2-4-rate-sho... [2] for example, http://irishdev.com/Home/News/1403-The-State-of-Play--IT-Gra... though from personal experience I know this to be true for all kinds of computer/programming related jobs |