This month's Exchequer receipts will be "absolutely critical" to the direction of the State finances this year, according to one tax expert.
The Department of Finance yesterday published Exchequer figures for May, which showed a more-than 30% drop in corporation tax take in the month.
May is an important month for tax - though June and November are generally the most significant in terms of the country's finances.
"It's too early to call [the corporation tax dip] as a concern but we didn't expect it," said Peter Vale, tax partner at Grant Thornton Ireland. "The Department put it down to one-off factors - which I think makes sense, but I'm not sure it explains all of it.
"Full year '25 guidance from a lot of the big foreign multinationals here are generally positive, so we would have expected that to play into the numbers and seen a stronger set of figures yesterday, which we didn't."
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Separate data from the Central Statistics Office yesterday showed Ireland's GDP had boomed in the first three months of the year, due to comapnies' ramping up their exports to get ahead of US tariffs.
There had been some expectation that this would also boost the country's tax take.
"It probably underlines a reliance on a pretty small cohort of multionationals for our profit - and a change in a dip in their results, even a change in the tax profile of one or two companies can have a hugely distortive impact on the numbers," he said.
That distortion also means that a dramatic swing in the monthly figures can happen - and be correctly shortly afterwards. However if the trend continues this month, it will indicate that there is something more significant underlying it.
"We've been here before - May '23 we saw a bad May and we rebounded," said Mr Vale. "I think June is absolutely critical, not just because it's the next month but because June and November are linked - a bad June generally indicates a bad November.
"Is this a blip or is it the beginning of a trend? The next month is key."
Yesterday's Exchequer figures did also show a rise in both income tax and VAT - both on a monthly and year-to-date basis.
That, Mr Vale said, pointed to a resilience within the domestic economy, despite the global headwinds that are currently being experienced.
