U2, Brute?

[Gob]

“We are a tiny little country, we don’t have scale, and our version of scale is to be innovative and to be clever, and tax competitiveness has brought our country the only prosperity we’ve known,” Bono said.

“That’s how we got these [tech] companies here. Little countries, we don’t have natural resources, we have to be able to attract people. We’ve been through the 50s and the 60s, and mass hemorrhaging of our population all over the world. There are more hospitals and firemen and teachers because of [Ireland’s tax] policy.”

However, one of the major workers’ unions in Ireland sees things rather differently to the musician.

“The one in four who suffer deprivation as well as the tens of thousands of others having to put up with six years of austerity will regard Bono’s remarks with total derision, it is the only word anyone could use to describe what he has said,” Unite spokesman and economist, Mike Taft, told the Guardian.

“Where else can you begin with his defense of this low corporation tax regime? As well as the one-in-four, it is worth pointing out that wages in Ireland are well below the European average and for six years we have seen public services smashed apart due to austerity cuts, and here we have Bono talking about low corporation tax bringing us prosperity.”

Yeah, and then there’s the fact that U2 doesn’t actually pay any tax itself in Ireland—seems Bono is confident that the 12.5 % tax (and often way lower courtesy of controversial “double Irish” tax avoidance schemes) his pals at Apple and Google pay, is way more than enough to keep his fellow Irish in the prosperity he believes they currently live in—because, back in 2006 the band moved their global music empire to the Netherlands, where they pay an even lower rate of tax, and enjoy the benefits of less stringent transparency laws.

Just like Exxon Mobil! They too pay taxes in the Netherlands—the very subject Bono took umbrage at during his speech at the Clinton Global Initiative last year!