Ireland

01Structure

Ireland's national accounts describe two economies at once. One is a domestic economy of about five million people; the other is the European base of a large share of the world's biggest technology and pharmaceutical companies, whose profits, intellectual property and contract manufacturing are booked in Ireland. Industry shows up as over thirty per cent of value added — more than any other economy on this site — almost entirely because of the second.

That makes GDP an unreliable measure for Ireland, and the output figure in the panel above should be read with that in mind: a single multinational moving intellectual property can shift Irish GDP by several percentage points in a quarter. Irish statisticians publish modified measures — modified gross national income, GNI*, and modified domestic demand — precisely to strip that out.¹

02Trade and exposure

Exports amount to about one and a half times GDP, a ratio only possible because so much of what is counted as Irish output is produced, licensed or sold by foreign-owned firms. Pharmaceuticals, medical devices and computer services dominate, and the United States is both the largest destination and the home of most of the firms involved.

The exposure is therefore to American corporate and tax policy as much as to any market: a change in where US companies book profits or site production reaches the Irish economy directly.

03Energy and resources

Ireland imports about four fifths of the energy it uses, with gas arriving by pipeline through Britain. Electricity is dominated by gas and a fast-growing wind fleet.

The distinctive pressure is demand rather than supply: data centres already use about a fifth of the country's electricity,² and constraints on connecting new ones are argued to put the corporate tax base at risk, because intellectual property may follow the data centres to wherever they can be built.

04Labour and demography

About eighty per cent of 20- to 64-year-olds are in work, and youth unemployment is near twelve per cent. The multinational sector employs a far smaller share of workers than its share of output, so the labour market tracks the domestic economy — and modified domestic demand — much more closely than it tracks GDP.

Net immigration has supplied much of the growth in the workforce, which is one reason the housing supply constraint dominates Irish domestic politics.

05Public finances

Ireland runs budget surpluses while most of Europe runs deficits — €11.2 billion in 2025, or 3.3 per cent of GNI*.³ The source is corporation tax: about €33 billion a year, the bulk of it paid by a small number of multinationals, and foreign-owned firms account for nearly three of every ten euros the state collects in tax and social contributions.⁴

That concentration is the structural risk. Surpluses funded by a few firms' profits can disappear with a change in US tax law or a single relocation, which is why a share of the windfall is being put into long-term funds rather than into recurring spending. The debt ratio in the panel above looks low partly because it is measured against an inflated GDP.

06Money and prices

Ireland has set no policy rate of its own since 1999; the rate shown above is the European Central Bank's. The Irish banking collapse after 2008 was the clearest case of a common rate being far too loose for one member's credit cycle.

Today the domestic economy's cycle is again out of step with the euro-area average — tighter labour market, higher housing pressure — while the multinational sector's activity responds to global conditions that the ECB does not set at all.

07What the models expect

These are computed on this site from each series' own history, and are nobody's official projection. The bar is the range the figure lands in half the time; the dot is the central path.

Replayed from past origins on today's revised figures, the same baseline was usually off by 0.76 on consumer price inflation, 4.87 on real gdp, 0.25 on unemployment rate, 0.60 on central bank policy rate, 9.85 on government debt.

08Structural indicators

The figures behind the sections above. They move by a point or two a year, so each carries the year it was measured.

09Sources and method

Live figures: Eurostat, Bank for International Settlements. Each is fetched nightly and validated before publication; the delivery report on /status/ says how old every one of them is. Profile written 2026-09-11, next review September 2027.

1. Modified measures of national income and domestic demand — NTMA, Irish economy and public finances
2. Data centre electricity use and the risk to the corporate tax base — The Irish Times, May 2026
3. The 2025 surplus relative to GNI* — NTMA, Irish economy and public finances
4. Multinationals' share of tax and PRSI receipts — ABC Money, September 2026