Thank Fathom it’s Friday

State-sanctioned wealth destruction

Declan McCormack5 December 2025|

Having grown up in Galway, a beautiful town on the west coast of Ireland, and lived in cities from Dublin to New York and now London, I can’t help but compare places through familiar lenses: public transport, housing, quality of life, the usual things people debate when they move abroad. But only in the last few years, as I started thinking seriously about long-term saving and building wealth as a retail investor, did I realise there’s another very important difference between these places: how the government treats ordinary people who try to invest. And on that front, Ireland isn’t just uncompetitive, it is hostile to retail investors who are trying to build wealth, as this TFiF will show. To understand why Ireland’s investment landscape is so punishing, we first need to look at how exchange-traded fund (ETF) investors are treated in Ireland versus the UK. For most retail investors, ETFs are the simplest and most effective way to build long-term wealth: