I have some sympathy with the Irish government/DoF view on this.....broad based ETFs actually do a large amount of internal buying and selling thousands of trades in fact within the portfolio but via the redemption mechanism its kind of obscured.....they are better thought of as tax deferral schemes....deferring tax is mechanism by which you make the Government your business partner.....in this case the Irish government is lending you 33% of your embedded gains @ 0% interest rate (by not forcing you to pay cap gain) which you then get to keep in an asset class with a proven track record of delivering high single digit returns.....its an epic trade.....