The Irish economy dodged a bullet this year. Several of them, in fact. Back in April, we were trying to count the cost of Donald Trump’s tariff threats and his demand that American multinationals relocate production to their home market. This week, official Irish figures showed that we have so far got away with it. It will be another record year for corporation tax – €10 billion was taken in during November alone – and the economy continued to record steady growth right into the third quarter of the year, outpacing all the big EU economies. Against the backdrop of all the uncertainty, this is remarkable.

The 10 per cent plus annual growth in Irish GDP recorded this week by the CSO will be rightly written off across Europe as more “leprechaun economics”. But what is easily missed in this debate is that, excluding all the multinational distortions, the domestic economy – the bit relevant to our lives – grew by around 5 per cent. Consumers are spending and businesses are investing. There are signs that the jobs market is slowing, with retrenchment in parts of the tech sector in particular. But 2025 was another decent year for the Irish economy.

It all looks so different from Trump’s “Independence Day” last April. Official estimates were, for example, that a........

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