The banks in Ireland are another affair entirely, but in terms of government regulations, things are surprisingly light weight for a country in the euro zone, and are probably better than the US in many domains.
As I heard a startup founder say recently: "One of the strengths of Ireland is that we will happily adopt the business practices of any foreigner in replacement of whatever use to stand for business practices the country had in the '80s."
It would be quite funny, although also given the tax structure pretty much inevitable, that if/when Stripe launched their product in the EU they set up a Irish subsidiary to take advantage of those tax arrangements.
In many countries tax is masked various ways. For example there is 'social insurance' and 'health insurance' calculated from income and de-facto is income tax. Also your employer has to pay 'contributions' which also depends on your income.
Real income taxation in country like Germany is typically between 50% to 80% for any decent software developer.
As I heard a startup founder say recently: "One of the strengths of Ireland is that we will happily adopt the business practices of any foreigner in replacement of whatever use to stand for business practices the country had in the '80s."