The record-breaking tax amounts collected by the Exchequer in November, the most important fiscal month of the year, have been widely dissected by now, but it’s still worth adding a few comparators in an effort to comprehend the staggering amounts reported on Wednesday.

The €20 billion in taxes paid last month were half corporation tax, half all other taxes. All are significantly up so far this year, except motor tax. Unlike in November last year (the only ever month with larger tax receipts), there was no one-off payment resulting from the Apple court ruling in Europe.

When you exclude the effects of the funds released from this Apple escrow account in late 2024 and early 2025, the economy had paid exactly as much tax by the end of November so far this year as it did in the whole of 2024, at €97 billion.

December, when tax revenue is driven by Microsoft’s preliminary corporation tax payment and will reflect the software giant’s glowing financial health, will round off another record-breaking year. 

Excluding the effects of the Apple court decision, I expect the 2025 tax take to approach €105 billion. This will include over €32 billion in corporation tax, which won’t overtake income tax as the Exchequer’s number-one resource just yet but is really closing in.

The €2.6 billion increase in corporation tax payments last month alone, compared to November 2024, paid for the entire National Children’s Hospital – including last-minute overruns we don’t yet know about as the building’s completion milestones were again pushed back last week.

This tension between the apparently unlimited flow of money into the State’s coffers and the struggle it faces in investing it in necessary infrastructure was most striking on Wednesday. Minister for Public Expenditure Jack Chambers unveiled his infrastructure acceleration plan hours before his newly minted finance colleague, Tánaiste Simon Harris, welcomed the “strong income tax and Vat returns” projected in the latest budget, alongside the “elevated level” of corporation tax.

The acceleration plan contains ambitious reforms of the legal process seen to be hampering project delivery, but analysis by Michael and Niall showed that this may delay its implementation as the reforms themselves may face challenges all the way to EU courts.

Balconies rather than homes

The Currency’s columnists tackled these issues from various angles last week. Ronan dissected the fragmented approach to environmental compliance in the Irish planning process, taking the recent challenge to Dublin’s Metrolink as an example.

He looked to other European countries for examples of streamlined enforcement of the same international obligations, from Denmark where specialist appeal boards address these issues, to France where project requirements are clearly codified into unified written legislation. 

A detailed rulebook would help avoid situations such as the one detailed in a 49-page High Court judgment published by Justice David Holland on Monday, quashing An Coimisiún Pleanála (ACP)’s 2023 grant of planning permission for 422 apartments in Stepaside, Co Dublin to Ironborn Real Estate Ltd, a vehicle of the London investment firm Tristan Capital. 

The challenge was mounted by Fernleigh Residents Association. Two years on, the court found that ACP had been wrong to allow the developer to omit balconies at 74 of those apartments, in contravention of the Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown county development plan (This was in response to a previous challenge over daylight requirements).

The French example, which I also used here last week to draw lessons from the ongoing Paris metro extension, has been so widely cited that a caveat may be useful. For all the clarity and centralisation of Gallic planning rules, the partially built A69 in the south of the country is now facing demolition after a successful challenge under environmental law, unless appeals reverse that decision. This follows a similar debacle around a proposed airport in western France in recent years. 

Colm, meanwhile, took a somewhat opposite view and blamed the bewildering state of Irish infrastructure development on the lack of value-for-money scrutiny at government level. This, he argued, means too many infrastructure projects are launched without sufficient prioritisation.

He was not heard by the Government, whose acceleration plan includes a raising of the threshold for such economic assessments by the Major Projects Advisory Group from €200 million to €500 million “for sectors with a well-established and proven track record of delivery”.

“Fiscal vulnerabilities”

The fact that anything under half a billion euro is no longer deemed worthy of the highest level of value-for-money scrutiny brings us back to the rude health of Ireland’s public finances.

It is unclear how much of the Exchequer performance this year is owed to pharmaceutical multinationals and domestic manufacturers, such as those of food and drink, front-loading exports to the US ahead of President Donald Trump’s tariff blitz earlier in the year.

Quarterly national accounts released by the CSO on Thursday showed a contrasted picture, with the multinational IT sector roaring ahead while manufacturing and construction slowed down and the national payroll shrank by 0.1 per cent year-on-year. 

Anecdotally, “staff wanted” signs have disappeared from most shop windows and stories of houses taking months to sell are becoming more common. Dan explored what it would take for this soft patch to turn into a recession. His answer? Not much. 

Harris’s own officials said nothing else in a paper on “fiscal vulnerabilities” analysing the risks for the coming year.

The Department of Finance highlighted the narrowness of the tax base, with most revenue coming from those few multinational-led sectors doing well in the CSO’s quarterly accounts. As a result, 10 per cent of taxpayers (the highest earners and the employees of multinationals, especially) pay 40 per cent of total income tax, and 10 companies pay 57 per cent of all corporation tax. 

Meanwhile, “the role of reduced rates and tax exemptions narrows the Vat base and is a further source of vulnerability for the public finances,” officials wrote – which the Government has chosen to exacerbate with Budget 2026’s reduction in the restaurant rate.

Abundance and hard choices

As he takes over the finance portfolio, Harris inherits bulging coffers where abundance makes hard choices less and less palatable, despite all the warning signs that they are necessary ahead of an inevitable reversal of fortune. 

What is, in the end, the story of this Government? Elected to be competent, unloved stewards of the public finances, given one last chance to fix housing and its attendant infrastructure problems, the coalition has now produced three major statements in answer to this question.

The first was the budget, where the Government chose tax breaks for business over households, and the expansion of existing services over the introduction of new, promised services. 

The second was the new housing plan, itself an outcrop of the National Development Plan agreed over the summer. With its laudable focus on community and homelessness, it largely reproduces the structures that have been in place since the last decade, supported with yet more money. 

The third is this week’s accelerating infrastructure action plan. It is perhaps the most ambitious document this Government will produce. It therefore bears huge risk for the coalition, upside and downside. Its leaders know that to succeed in the development of infrastructure is to succeed in the delivery of housing and, consequently, in the delivery of the promises that re-elected them. To fail, is very simply, to fail. 

This will be decided in one single calendar year; 2026 will be the defining year of this Government if any reform it wants to pass are to translate into any bricks-and-mortar results in time for the next election. Absent major progress on infrastructure, it is a lame duck, holding space until the arrival of its replacement.

Failure would not just result in careers destroyed. Deeper, and more importantly, it would fuel the disbelief amongst the Irish people that things can simply be done, and justify cynicism.

If the Government is not willing to make the hard choices that are required to get things done, then it did not deserve the power it was given in 2024.

*****

Elsewhere last week, Francesca interviewed European Commissioner for Justice Michael McGrath. With good alignment between his proposals for a 28th registration regime allowing companies to operate EU-wide, due in the new year, and the Irish presidency of the EU in the second half of 2026, there is an opportunity for Ireland to deliver a significant improvement to the bloc’s business environment. 

In another major interview, former Tánaiste Simon Coveney told Michael about his pivot from politics to business – alongside the continuum of geopolitical events, from Brexit to the war in Ukraine. He is now planning to raise €200 million for his new defence-focused investment fund Fulcrum. 

On Thursday, Alice broke the news that the respected businessman Barry Synnott had resigned from the board of the Port of Cork. This is the third high-level resignation at the semi-state company in five months, amid internal rifts concerning its governance. We will continue to watch developments there. 

Finally, Stuart wrote a brutally honest column in response to a student who had asked him whether the long hours worked by entrepreneurs were worth the personal torment. Would he do it again? His answer, informed by the latest research, is more nuanced than you might think.