Luckily, along with @3000Versts, we didn’t try to predict how the Brexit story was going to work out in the days following our get together to record Episode 3 of our podcast on Wednesday.

We’ve both kept an eye on the de Souza case over the past couple of years and still don’t see why someone puts hubris before husband. The issue has been prolonged because the obvious remedy is refused, because someone has a point to make.

Meanwhile, hubris is an entire economy if we are to look at recent IMF reports and note stories that perhaps haven’t made the headlines over recent years. The ‘low tax’ Irish economy is essentially parasitical, sucking in spreadsheet entires that effectively deny tax takes in big economies such as France, Germany and the UK. More on that in previous article below, but global businesses with funds ‘resting in Irish accounts’ is not on such a scale that it can’t be ignored indefinitely – and isn’t.

As if the OECD plans on global tax taking a direct pop at the Irish economic model (and others such as Netherlands and Luxembourg) but the more puzzling threat is in what might just be the final aspects of the Withdrawal Agreement between the UK and EU. No backstop, but also the UK (as a whole) no longer within the Customs Union, which means East West trade between the Republic and  UK will be subject to all customs and regulatory checks lest there be a threat to the precious Single Market. Not sure that one has been thought through entirely, though we’ll have to wait for the detail….