And because the Irish pay so little tax other Europeans have to raise €85,000,000,000.- to bail them out.

Have you read any of the comments here? The individual tax rate has nothing to do with the fact that the gov't got suckered/bullied into guaranteeing bank bond holders in 2008. The irony is that a significant part of these bonds are held by German banks who don't have to/don't want to share the downside of the property bubble they basically funded throughout the 00's.

The Europeans are raising €85bn to loan the Irish and are charging 5.8% interest, which is 4.2% above the current European Central Bank base rate. All of this money will be paid back (hopefully) over the next X years by taxes on Irish citizens and cuts in public services.

MS Ireland is here, both buildings. I think there are more than accountants & lawyers. There's dev/test, localisation & ops.

If they're actually that big and that well entrenched in Ireland, they won't just pick up their ball and go home that easily

Dell were, and they did.

You would expect it to be rich and prosperous society, but somehow it is on the verge of bankrupcy

Yes, but perhaps not for the reason you suspect. See my answer above.

Not in the Irish case. Companies "in Ireland for tax reasons" don't necessarily employ many people there.

Google employs about 3,000 people in Ireland, Intel employs ~4,000. I don't have the numbers off hand for MS or the large number of pharma companies, but it's quite substantial when you consider the population that is of working age is ~1M.

If having all those corporations in the country tax-free is so good, then WHY is Ireland going bankrupt?

Because they are not related. The country is going bankrupt because the government gave guarantees to a large commercial bank and a number of commercial/consumer banks that had lended heavily to support a ridiculous property bubble. They didn't do proper due dilligence on the guarantees, were lied to by the bankers about the size of the hole they were in and now the tax payer is now faced with a debt so large that the 'real' economy can't possibly generate enough revenue to repay.

There's a decent explanation here: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Why-the-Irish-Crisis-is-Going-usnews-4028366968.html?x=0

Seems the news is just that the Foundation might not continue operating in its current legal framework

This has long been a possibility. But I've heard rumours of a Second Foundation.

Can't believe nobody's made the "it was all fine until Bobby Tables ordered" joke yet: http://xkcd.com/327/

without even realizing that they're giving permission for the app to access their data

And, by default, all their friends' shared data: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/note.php?note_id=164091843257&ref=mf