My friend the hill farmer went into anaphylactic shock last week when he heard that the double Irish could be banned.

Part of him knew this day was long coming. In a country rated second after Austria out of 194 in a survey by the World Health Organisation on binge drinking, it was only a matter of time until banning the double Irish became a reality.

Alcohol abuse costs the Irish government at least €4bn a year in healthcare, crime and lost work hours. Worse, the hill farmer muttered, if they ban the double, how long will it be until they ban the half one? When I explained this was about tax, not whiskey, his wind-beaten features relaxed into an expression of relief normally reserved for the tax accountants of offshore multinationals.

Ireland is good at many things, including making whiskey - with an “e” - and resourceful corporate tax architecture. We have to be.

We have no natural resources to speak of and are a small open economy with a population of 4.6m. We do not control our interest rates (the European Central Bank does) or the level of our currency (Frankfurt again). This leaves tax legislation as the one sovereign tool for obtaining an edge. We have used tax incentives to attract inward foreign investment, which leads to jobs - and, in the process, over two decades, have transformed a sluggish and backward agricultural economy into a European Silicon Valley.

The double Irish may have begun its long goodbye on Tuesday - for existing companies there will be a transition period until 2020 - but our 12.5 per cent corporation profits tax is not up for grabs. Companies, including Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, are established here, attracted in part by this low tax.

They employ thousands of Irish workers and are vital to the Irish economy. But each Irish job won in this way represents a job lost to another country. This is why politicians such as David Cameron, British prime minister, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, would love to give the Emerald Isle an anaphylactic, not only by removing the double Irish, as has now happened, but by compelling Ireland to raise corporate taxes as well.

As the hill farmer says, this may only be the thin edge of the wedge. A small country like Ireland has to be nimble to survive. We have to box clever. We are part of the EU but we cannot rely on large political blocs to look out for us. This was clear in 2008 when the Irish state was forced by the ECB to underwrite the liabilities of German and other banks and bondholders in insolvent Irish financial institutions. About €70bn was involved. This led, two years later, to Ireland becoming a client country of the International Monetary Fund, whose bailout money cost us 4.99 per cent a year.

Through painful austerity and hard work, Ireland has left the IMF programme and can borrow 10-year money at 1.7 per cent. The economy is forecast to grow by 5 per cent this year and next. The glass, which recently looked more than half empty, suddenly looks like being over half full.

Prudently, the Irish government wants to pay down its IMF loan early but it needs the agreement of all EU countries. Germany has said Yes. But, warns Steffen Kampeter, Germany’s deputy finance minister, “solidarity is not a one-way street”. He has Ireland’s low-tax regime in his sights, as does Mr Cameron, who sees jobs he would die for slipping away across the Irish Sea.

What is a loophole to one country is an opportunity to another. Ireland should keep the rim of the glass pressed firmly to the optic. No one else will help us to get these jobs. It is every man for himself out here in these hills.