Fewer than half of new businesses survive long enough to see their fifth birthday, let alone those that experienced a pandemic in the middle of those first five years. As The Currency reaches this milestone this Wednesday, we can breathe a sigh of relief and address massive thanks to our members who have made it possible.

We can also look forward to the next five years and draw lessons from our experience so far. There are reasons why over 6,000 people across Ireland and beyond have decided to pay for quality journalism, allowing The Currency to expand its permanent team to 10 people and into London – not to mention many more valued contributors. 

A survey of our members conducted this year by Amárach shows that they are largely senior professionals, half of whom own their business or operate at the level of chief executive or managing director, and eight out of 10 view The Currency as different or very different from other news publications.

The top reason they give for this difference, by a large margin, is “deeper, insightful, well-researched analysis and coverage”. Next come “more focused coverage”, “better quality journalism” and a perception that The Currency is “informative, investigative, and knowledge-based”.

This is comforting because those values are those we have strived to translate into our coverage since our website went live on September 25, 2019. Ian recalled that eventful day on the occasion of a previous anniversary and you can read all about it here.

I have picked one long read from each of The Currency’s years in business to illustrate what this means.

September 2019 – Leveraging surrender: how IBRC followed the Quinn money trail

When I joined The Currency in August 2019 to contribute to its launch, I had only ever worked for media publishers that gave me word limits for the length of my articles. To break this mould, Ian mentioned the example of an article he was writing. It was centered on the decade-long quest by liquidators to the former Anglo Irish Bank to recover assets from Sean Quinn and his family. 

“It’s like a chapter in a book,” Ian told me. When the story was published in the first week of The Currency’s existence, it was indeed almost 10,000 words long. It took the reader from Fermanagh to Hyderabad via Kyiv and Moscow. The people involved included dogged Irish accountants, a Dutch expat lawyer in Dubai who died of a heart attack mid-proceedings, a millionaire Russian railway worker, and Quinn family members willing to play high-stakes poker with hundreds of millions of euro until the last second.

It is as relevant today, as relics of the former Quinn empire such as the Mannok industrial group and the Slieve Russell hotel change hands, as it was five years ago. Whenever such a transaction takes place and Sean Quinn breaks his (relative) silence to pose as a victim, it is worth revisiting the years of obfuscation organised to escape his creditors.

October 2020 – The full story of FBD’s battle with Ireland’s publicans

Of all the ramifications of the Covid-19 pandemic, the High Court case that pitted pub owners against their insurer was one of the most enlightening. It captured the tension between public health policy and business interests, the legalistic nature of many disagreements in Irish business, and above all the personal impact of these issues on countless small business owners. 

There was no better person to capture it than Francesca. The full title of her full-length coverage of the three-week hearing (mostly held remotely) into the test case taken by four publicans against FBD Insurance included the phrase: “Human stories wrapped up in the meaning of words.”

The sample of complaints before Mr Justice Denis McDonald determined the fate of 1,100 Irish bars insured with FBD for risks including “infectious diseases”. The insurer argued that pubs had not closed “following” and outbreak of disease, but rather as a result of public policy to impose lockdowns. FBD had provisioned €22 million in case it lost its case.

Publican Noel Anderson described a “surreal” industry meeting with FBD executives including the then chief executive Fiona Muldoon on St Patrick’s Day, 2020, two days after pubs were ordered to close. It became immediately clear that cover for business interruption would be hard-fought. The battle “consumed” him, he told the court.

Francesca’s article is a blow-by-blow account of the legal arguments and the human toll unveiled by the case. The following January, the publicans won. A recent interview with Anderson shows that the episode, just like the wider scars of the pandemic, is still fresh in publicans’ minds. 

June 2021: Davy in disgrace

In March 2021, the Central Bank imposed a record €4.13 million fine on Davy. The stockbroking firm had acted “recklessly” in the 2014 sale of Anglo Irish Bank bonds on behalf of its client, developer Patrick Kearney, the regulator found. Davy had “prioritised” a group of 16 of its staff making a “personal financial gain over ensuring that it was complying with its regulatory obligations”. The so-called Davy 16 individuals were the buyers of Kearney’s bonds at a discount price, unknown to him at the time.

The Currency led the way in the coverage of the Davy bond scandal, a controversy that led to a spate of resignations and the ultimate sale of the broker. Over the following months, Tom uncovered exactly what had occurred, cross-referencing multiple sources, documents, courtroom filings and new information. 

His three-part expose first introduced the cast of characters who gathered around Kearney as he sought to sell his Anglo bonds. Part two minutely reconstructed the day when the deal was done, detailing the manoeuvering by Davy executives to thwart a potentially better offer. Finally, Tom examined how the Central Bank investigated the transaction and Davy’s response, and obtained comment from one of the Davy 16.

His investigation is the definitive account of the biggest scandal of the past five years in Irish finance.

February 2022: Stephen Kinsella meets Bobby Healy

The Currency is not solely the work of its core team of professional journalists. We also ask ourselves questions such as: What would happen if you put one each of Ireland’s most brilliant economists and entrepreneurs together and just listened in?

Until his recent appointment as economic advisor to the Taoiseach, University of Limerick professor of economics Stephen Kinsella was among the select team of academics, entrepreneurs, investors and professionals who contribute regularly to our coverage.

As Covid-19 restrictions finally lifted, he recorded an hour-long discussion with the founder of the drone company Manna Aero and, previously, the CTO of groundbreaking car hire software platform CarTrawler. The resulting podcast is just another format for the long-form journalism The Currency lives for. A full transcript is also available to read.

From the off, Stephen sets the tone: He’s not interested in Healy’s business in terms of funding rounds or customer contracts. “When I think about Manna Aero, I don’t think about coffees and sandwiches falling from the sky. I think about infrastructure,” he says. 

Their discussion takes in the societal licence required to deploy new technologies and the rise of AI, well before the hype surrounding the launch of ChatGPT at the end of that year. They also talk about the evolution of Ireland’s economy as the pandemic fades away (Healy correctly predicts a wave of business difficulties in the hospitality industry) and the country’s tax advantage erodes under international pressure.

Healy is vocal about the lack of a level playing field between multinationals and indigenous companies. “What gets thrown to me is Europe is the illegal state aid rule so there can’t be any handouts, but we can help Apple and Amazon all day long,” he points out. 

September 2023: The green jersey

Speaking of which, the taxation of multinationals is an area where The Currency has been recognised as the go-to source of information in Ireland and beyond. This time last year, the Exchequer’s extraordinary run at collecting corporation tax from US-headquartered companies appeared to wobble and it was time to set the record straight with a full examination of the rules and structures directing those intellectual property-backed financial flows to Ireland – the so-called green jersey.

My series started with an explanation that there was no wobble. It was simply a change in the timing of Apple’s tax payments in Ireland, as confirmed since then in the annual corporation tax take. After a record €23.8 billion last year, it could hit €30 billion this year.

I combined analysis of Irish data and transatlantic policy documents with an interview with US academic and former Treasury official Navodhya Samarakoon, who had just published unprecedented research into American corporate tax data, to uncover the reasons behind this boom.

Elsewhere in this series, I also covered the new rules applicable to multinationals in Ireland under the internationally agreed minimum 15 per cent corporation tax rate, while economists on both sides of the Atlantic reflected on the evolving landscape surrounding global corporate decisions to locate taxable profits in Ireland.

Readers of The Currency have a unique understanding of the links between individual multinational corporate structures, their tax bills, the national corporation tax take, and its impact on Exchequer finances and fiscal policy. For example, no other publication has identified Microsoft, Pfizer and Apple as Ireland’s three largest taxpayers, together paying one-third of corporation tax in 2021.

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