“if you do that you are going to see a flood of companies leaving Ireland and Canada and Germany and France and they are going to come back to the United States…”

Here’s something for Taoiseach Enda Kenny, and any one else, to keep in mind when they hear that US President-elect Donald Trump “understands Ireland very well.  He was complimentary about the decisions made about the economy here.”  The Belfast Telegraph reports comments by Stephen Moore, a “senior economic advisor to Mr Trump”, on BBC Radio 4’s World at One today.

From the Belfast Telegraph report

[Stephen] Moore, senior economic advisor to Mr Trump, said the centrepiece plan of the new Washington administration was wooing back multinationals with radical business tax cuts.

“I believe that when we cut these tax rates – we’re going to cut our business tax rate from roughly 35% down to roughly 15 to 20% – if you do that you are going to see a flood of companies leaving Ireland and Canada and Germany and France and they are going to come back to the United States,” he said.

“It is going to have a very high impact on jobs.”

Mr Moore, formerly a chief economist with US conservative think-tank the Heritage Foundation, said the effort to entice companies back from low corporate tax-rate countries would be central to boosting the US economy.

This was the “single most important thing for our country right now”, he told BBC Radio 4’s World At One.

“There is no question about it, and we see day after day in this country that we are losing our businesses and our corporations,” he said.

“They are effectively renouncing their US citizenship and they are moving to Canada, to Britain, to Ireland, to China and Mexico.

“That is a significant loss of jobs and we want to have the jobs here in the United States, we don’t want to have them go abroad.”

That should give everyone something to talk about on St Patrick’s Day…