Ireland also has lower rates in practice due to allowances for their largest corporations: Apple's allowance afforded them an effective rate of <1%, hence the $21 billion.
As a small company you can apply for this same innovation thing and get 17K tax deduction, and you have to put 500 hours into it. It's rediculous.
It's called "WBSO (Wet Bevordering Speur- en Ontwikkelingswerk)". Hoi Jan.
When the Apple ruling first came out there was talk of it being the first of others, but with how much resistance the Irish government have put up, it's hard to see them coming to fruition at this stage.
The deal with Apple was considered a sweetheart deal and is illegal (under EU law but not Irish) and not available to other companies.
OP is right correct approach is a consolidated tax rate/base across EMU.
The leak in the system is consolidated tax base, not different tax rates. That is, booking revenue (especially digital revenue) from sales across the whole of the EU in a single EU country for tax purposes promotes a race to the bottom. The right answer is to tax in proportion to the economic activity per country - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Consolidated_Corporate_... .
Unified corporate and income tax rates aren't a smart idea. There's no good reason to force one government to be less efficient than another.
Finally, the bailout (and to be clear: loans, not free money, and loans that were paid off early because they had higher interest rate than was available on the market) of Ireland was an indirect support for banks in other countries that had capital surplus for some years, Germany especially. The ECB forced Ireland to prevent bondholders from taking any losses - https://www.irishtimes.com/news/politics/ecb-refusal-on-bond...