Pinsent Masons has brought in James Quirke as a partner to lead its corporate tax team in Dublin, a hire the firm announced on 12 October 2026 and framed around the compliance burden its Irish clients now carry.
Quirke joins from McCann FitzGerald LLP, where he became a partner in 2024. He is a solicitor, a chartered accountant and a chartered tax advisor, which is an unusually broad set of qualifications for a tax lawyer and one that maps onto the work the firm describes him taking on.
The firm says his practice covers all aspects of corporate taxation, including mergers and acquisitions, cross-border tax planning and corporate restructurings, both domestic and international. It also names employment-related taxes, tax issues arising in insolvency, property-related matters and the tax implications of doing business in and from Ireland.
Lisa Carty, partner and head of the Dublin office, said tax planning and compliance have become increasingly complex in recent years, for multinational businesses with Irish operations and for Irish companies operating abroad alike. She pointed specifically to the OECD Pillar Two regime as having raised the stakes for clients, and said Quirke's expertise would be an invaluable support both to domestic clients and to those with cross-border corporate structures.
Quirke said that since establishing its Dublin office in 2017 Pinsent Masons has quickly established itself as one of the most successful firms in the market, and that its full-service offering and global footprint will be a huge asset to the companies he works with.
The hire is worth reading as a response to a specific structural change rather than as general expansion. Pillar Two moves a large part of tax work away from planning and toward computation, disclosure and defence, and it falls hardest on exactly the population Ireland's corporate base is made of: subsidiaries of large multinationals, and Irish-headquartered groups with operations abroad. A firm that wants that work needs someone who can read a consolidated group's numbers as well as its contracts, which is what a partner holding both an accountancy and a tax-advisory qualification alongside a practising certificate is for.
The second thing the appointment signals is where Pinsent Masons sees the Dublin office competing. Leading the corporate tax team is a practice-building role rather than a lateral addition to an existing bench, and the firm has placed it alongside its corporate and restructuring work rather than inside a standalone tax silo. That points at transaction-attached tax work, where the adviser is in the deal team rather than engaged separately afterwards.
The firm did not disclose whether a search firm was involved and gave no information about the size of the Dublin tax team.
