Madam, - I usually enjoy Garret FitzGerald's articles on a Saturday, despite his penchant for statistics and figures, but was surprised that in his latest piece, "What caused the Celtic Tiger phenomenon?" he omitted to mention what I've always considered the root cause of this phenomenon: our low rate of corporation tax.
He writes that during the Celtic Tiger years, which he defines as from 1993 to 2001, almost 300 mainly high-tech companies set up business in Ireland. Would these companies, especially large multinationals like Intel and Hewlett Packard, have come here if our corporation tax rates were not considerably lower than in the rest of Europe? Our low corporation tax rate attracted these companies, setting in train a sequence of events that resulted in the transformation of the Irish economy from "the sick man of Europe", with high unemployment and much talk about our debt to the World Bank, to a booming economy that generated unprecedented prosperity during the Celtic Tiger era. - Yours, etc,
JOE PATTON, Chapelizod Court, Chapelizod, Dublin 20.