PIECE 01The moneyLiving document
The question
Ireland's official GDP for 2024 was €561.9 billion. The CSO's own corrected measure of the same year was €321.6 billion. Both are official. Both are for the same twelve months.
Five figures on this page were wrong when it was published. Three were caught by readers. They are listed under "What changed on this page", struck through, not deleted.
Ireland's output per person, with the EU average set at 100. Second of 27 countries.
The gap between that headline and the CSO's own corrected measure of the same year. Two euro in five were never here.
Your voice — 140 words, at the top
The first time you heard "second-richest country in Europe" said seriously — who said it, where, and what the room did. Then one price you had paid that same week, for something ordinary, that you remember because it did not match.
One · The measurementwhat is true
The difference between those two official figures — €240.3 billion — is larger than the entire corrected figure for most of Ireland's history.
Ireland is the second-richest country in Europe.
A statistic used outside its definition. GDP measures output produced inside a border, not income available to the people behind it. In an economy where a handful of foreign multinationals hold intellectual property used worldwide but booked here, those two things come apart further than anywhere on earth. The CSO built GNI* in 2016 precisely because of this. It is not a critic's adjustment. It is the official one.
What the headline counts, and what is left when you take out what was never here
Ireland, 2024. Each bar is a published official figure except the last, which is the third bar minus one identified one-off.
How to read thisFour figures for the same country in the same year, drawn to the same scale. Each bar is a narrower definition of the money than the one above it.
CSO National Income and Expenditure, 2024. Taxes and social contributions alone are €125,796m of the €149.0bn total.
| Measure, Ireland 2024 | €m |
|---|---|
| Gross domestic product — the headline figure | 561,940 |
| Modified gross national income (GNI*) — the CSO's own correction | 321,636 |
| Total general government revenue — everything the state took in | 148,958 |
| Revenue excluding the €14.8bn Apple capital transfer | 134,188 |
CSO National Income and Expenditure, 2024. Figures in € million; the chart labels round them to billions.
Download CSVOn the corrected measure Ireland is a normal, prosperous western European country. Not a miracle, not a fraud. The gap between those two descriptions is where a decade of Irish political argument has been conducted.
The measurement gap
€240bn
The difference between Ireland's headline GDP and the national statistics office's own corrected measure of the same twelve months.
CSO National Income and Expenditure, 2024. GNI* is 57.2% of GDP. Two euro in every five that Ireland is credited with producing are not available to anyone who lives here — which is the statistics office's arithmetic, not an accusation.
Two · The small stateso what
This is the finding that surprised us and the one most likely to be attacked, so here is the method in full before the number.
Comparing on GDP puts Ireland at the top and makes every ratio meaningless. Correcting only Ireland to GNI* — which most Irish commentary does — fixes Ireland and leaves twenty-six countries uncorrected, which is worse. So: net national income, published by Eurostat on the same basis for every country. It corrects all of them or none.
Most of Europe spends more than it raises. Ireland raises more than it spends.
Each line runs from general government revenue to general government expenditure, both as a share of net national income, 2024.
How to read thisOne line per country. The circle is what the state takes in; the arrowhead is what it spends. Pointing right means it spends more than it raises — which is almost everyone. Ireland's points left, and starts from the lowest spending level on the chart.
| Basis | Revenue | Spending | Balance | Largest surplus in Europe? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| As published | 51.7% | 43.7% | +8.0 | Yes, 1st of 27 |
| Apple one-off removed | 46.6% | 43.7% | +2.9 | No, 3rd of 27 |
Eurostat gov_10a_main over nasa_10_nf_tr (S1, B5N), 2024. 27 countries: 26 EU member states plus Iceland.
| Country | Revenue (% of NNI) | Revenue excl. Apple (% of NNI) | Spending (% of NNI) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland | 51.7 | 46.6 | 43.7 |
| Cyprus | 54.5 | 54.5 | 49.1 |
| Denmark | 59.2 | 59.2 | 54.4 |
| Luxembourg | 91.7 | 91.7 | 90.0 |
| Greece | 58.8 | 58.8 | 57.2 |
| Portugal | 53.6 | 53.6 | 52.8 |
| Netherlands | 52.9 | 52.9 | 53.7 |
| Slovenia | 56.6 | 56.6 | 57.7 |
| Estonia | 52.9 | 52.9 | 54.3 |
| Lithuania | 45.1 | 45.1 | 46.6 |
| Sweden | 56.0 | 56.0 | 57.9 |
| Latvia | 54.9 | 54.9 | 57.1 |
| Czechia | 54.7 | 54.7 | 57.4 |
| Croatia | 54.1 | 54.1 | 56.8 |
| Germany | 56.4 | 56.4 | 59.6 |
| Spain | 50.1 | 50.1 | 53.9 |
| Italy | 57.4 | 57.4 | 61.5 |
| Malta | 44.9 | 44.9 | 49.5 |
| Iceland | 52.4 | 52.4 | 57.5 |
| Belgium | 60.3 | 60.3 | 65.6 |
| Finland | 67.3 | 67.3 | 72.8 |
| Austria | 64.2 | 64.2 | 70.1 |
| Hungary | 54.1 | 54.1 | 60.6 |
| Slovakia | 52.5 | 52.5 | 59.2 |
| France | 61.6 | 61.6 | 68.5 |
| Poland | 50.0 | 50.0 | 57.6 |
| Romania | 41.2 | 41.2 | 52.4 |
| EU average | 56.3 | 56.3 | 60.1 |
Eurostat gov_10a_main over nasa_10_nf_tr (S1, B5N), 2024. Ordered as the chart is, by the gap between spending and revenue. Only Ireland’s revenue differs between the two views; the last row is the EU27 aggregate, not one of the 27 countries.
Download CSVIreland raises 51.7% of net national income, 22nd of 27 — below average, but in the same range as Spain, Poland and the Netherlands. It is on the spending side that Ireland is an outlier, and the gap there is more than three times larger.
The common Irish story is that the state is starved of money by corporate tax arrangements. On this measure that is about a quarter of the story. Ireland is not a low-tax country with a normal state. It is a slightly-below-average-tax country with an unusually small one.
↳16.4 points of Ireland's 2024 net national income is roughly €47 billion a year. We derive NNI as revenue ÷ 0.517 = €288bn; if you have the published NNI series to hand and it differs, tell us and we will print the correction.
43.7%
of net national income spent by the Irish state
Lowest of 27
60.1%
EU average on the same measure
Eurostat
16.4
percentage points of national income between Ireland and the EU average
Derived
3.6×
bigger than the gap on the revenue side, which is 4.6 points
Derived
There is a version of the immigration argument that is not about resentment at all, and it is the one worth answering properly: we are spending enormous sums on asylum seekers, on Ukrainians, on immigrants and on people who are not working, and every euro of it is a euro that cannot go into a hospital, a house or a school place.
That is a claim about a trade-off, and a trade-off needs a limit. Ireland does not have one. In 2024 the State took in more than it spent — a surplus of 8.0 points of net national income as published, 2.9 points once the €14,770m Apple transfer is taken out. Somewhere between €8 billion and €23 billion arrived, was not spent, and was not spent on anybody. A country at its limit does not finish the year with money left over.
The sums people argue about, and the sum nobody argues about
Three figures drawn to one scale. The top bar is not a payment: it is what Ireland would have to spend every year to reach the European average.
How to read thisThe top bar is money the State does not spend. The two beneath it are money it does spend, drawn as a share of that gap.
Eurostat as above, with the welfare and asylum figures from Piece 04. The €47.3bn is derived: 16.4 points of net national income, itself derived as revenue ÷ 0.517 = €288bn. The spending figures are for 2025 and the income figure for 2024; the twelve-month offset does not change the order of magnitude.
| Sum | €m | Share of the spending gap |
|---|---|---|
| Gap between Irish state spending and the EU average, at 2024 income | 47,252 | 100% |
| All social welfare spending, 2025 | 27,402 | 58.0% |
| Asylum accommodation, 2025 | 1,200 | 2.5% |
| Daily Expenses Allowance — the asylum payment, 2025 | 48.6 | 0.10% |
Eurostat gov_10a_main over nasa_10_nf_tr (S1, B5N), 2024, for the gap; Department of Social Protection Annual Statistics Report 2025 for welfare and the allowance; Minister for Justice via RTÉ, 1 February 2026, for accommodation. The gap is a derived figure and the accommodation figure is secondary, not primary — both are flagged wherever they appear.
Download CSVAbolish the Daily Expenses Allowance and every asylum accommodation contract in the country tomorrow morning, and Irish state spending falls from 43.7% of national income to 43.3%. Still last of twenty-seven.
Go very much further. Abolish the entire welfare state — every State pension, every child benefit payment, every disability allowance, 82% of which goes to Irish nationals — and Ireland lands at 34.2%, which is further from the European average than where it started.
The sums in this argument are not the wrong sums because they are small. They are the wrong sums because the hole they are being asked to explain is €47 billion a year — 38 times what is spent on asylum accommodation and the asylum payment together, and 1.7 times the entire welfare budget — and it is a hole made of money that was never spent on anyone at all. Ireland is not choosing between an accommodation contract and a hospital. It is not choosing.
The claim names four groups and only two of them carry a published price here: asylum accommodation (€1.2bn, the weakest-sourced figure on this site and flagged as such wherever it appears) and the Daily Expenses Allowance (€48.6m). We do not hold a verified figure for accommodating Ukrainians under temporary protection and we will not estimate one. If you have the published source, send it and it goes on this page. It does not change the test: closing the gap takes €47 billion a year, every year, and no combination of these groups comes near it.
Piece 04 sets out who actually receives Irish welfare, and what the asylum system costs →
Partly right. Age structure is the single largest driver of variation in state spending across Europe, and Ireland has the youngest population in the EU. Some of the 16.4-point gap is demography, not choice.
Two things stop it explaining the result. First, the gap is far too large: no plausible demographic adjustment moves a country from 43.7% to 60.1%. Second, a young population is an argument for spending more on what a young population needs — housing, childcare, schools, transport — which is precisely where Ireland's shortfalls are. "We are young, so we spend less" is not a defence if what you are not spending it on is the young.
Lowest of twenty-seven
43.7%
Of net national income is what the Irish state spends. The EU average is 60.1%.
Eurostat gov_10a_main over nasa_10_nf_tr, 2024. 26 EU member states plus Iceland; Bulgaria has no comparable series. The gap on the spending side is 3.6 times the gap on the revenue side.
Three · What would move itnow what
None of these requires anyone to raise a tax or cut a programme. They are changes to what gets measured and published, which is the cheapest kind of reform and the kind that makes every subsequent argument better.
That is the pattern across this whole site, and it is not an accident. When a country argues in the absence of a table it already holds, the gap gets filled by whoever is most confident.
What is inside "revenue". Total general government revenue for 2024 is €148,958m. Taxes and social contributions specifically — the part out of wages, profits and purchases — are €125,796m; the rest is investment income, sales of goods and services, EU receipts and one-off transfers. Conflating those is an error we made on this page once. The €14,770m Apple capital transfer, arising from the CJEU state-aid judgment, is a single non-recurring receipt and is shown both ways permanently, never silently either way.
Why net national income. GDP is unusable for Irish ratios. GNI* fixes Ireland and nothing else, so any GNI*-based international comparison is one country corrected and twenty-six not. Net national income — income accruing to residents after depreciation — is published by Eurostat on the same basis for everyone. It corrects all of them or none.
The 27 countries. 26 EU member states plus Iceland. Bulgaria has no comparable NNI series in the extract and is excluded. The extract also contains two aggregate rows, EU27 and the euro area, which are shown as reference lines and are not counted as countries — we made exactly that mistake once and it is in the changelog.
Luxembourg. Luxembourg's 90.0% is an artefact of the same kind of distortion that affects Ireland's GDP, in the opposite direction — its net national income is suppressed by very large outflows to cross-border workers and foreign owners. We flag it rather than quietly dropping it. Excluding Luxembourg changes nothing about Ireland's position.
Derived figures. Ireland's NNI is derived as revenue ÷ 0.517 = €288bn, and the €47bn "gap in euro" figure follows from it. Both are labelled as derived wherever they appear.
What is excluded. Norway and Switzerland are not in the NNI extract.
gov_10a_main — general government revenue and expenditure by country, 2024.nasa_10_nf_tr, sector S1, item B5N — net national income, 2024.prc_ppp_ind_1 — volume indices of real expenditure per capita, EU27 = 100.prc_ppp_ind, retired in December 2025 and replaced by prc_ppp_ind_1. We had not checked whether the table was still live. The 2025 figure is 238.Is there an age-standardised comparison of European state spending on a net national income basis? Ireland has the youngest population in the EU, which is the best objection to this page, and we cannot answer it properly because we cannot find a published adjustment.
Read next · Piece 02
2.71 people added per home completed. The counties under most pressure are the ones fewest people moved to.
Read it →
In the pipeline
Receipts by concentration, the sovereign fund, and what the Fiscal Advisory Council has already said. Data pulled, analysis under way.
Coming