Dublin’s future? A hub for financial firms fleeing Brexit?

Dublin • Britain's plans to leave the European Union threaten to cause Ireland all kinds of economic and security headaches.

But a silver lining is expanding daily along the crane-filled banks of the River Liffey, a likely post-Brexit refuge for British banking operations.

Dublin's financial district barely existed three decades ago but today stretches for nearly a mile on both banks of the river. More than 60 construction cranes are erecting future high-rise offices, hotels and apartments along the riverfront.

Britain's definitive exit from the EU may be at least two years away, but Dublin is doubling down on its commercial building revival, confident that thousands of financial services jobs are poised to migrate 290 miles northwest in search of a new EU home that's not too legally, linguistically or culturally different from London.

While similar sales pitches are being proffered from Luxembourg, France, Germany and other EU countries, Ireland considers itself best positioned. In Dublin, the dominant concern is whether there will be enough offices, homes and school space.

"Every one of these construction sites already has tenants booked through 2019. We'll need to build faster and higher if there's a hard Brexit as we now expect," said Shane Dempsey, spokesman for the Construction Industry Federation of Ireland , while observing the riverside panorama from Dublin's glass-fronted convention center.

Under a "hard" Brexit, Britain would leave the EU without retaining privileged access to the bloc's single market. Financial houses based in London that currently manage assets and investments throughout the union would need to transfer some operations, and potentially a sizable chunk of their work force, to retain business.

Dempsey says authorities planning Ireland's infrastructure needs through 2040 estimate that the country, even without a single Brexit-related job, already requires more than 110,000 construction workers on top of the 140,000 employed today building projects valued at $20 billion.

Those targets will have to be raised if London-based jobs come to Dublin. Among the companies already signaling their interest are Britain's second-largest bank, Barclays, and U.S. asset manager Legg Mason.

The Central Bank says it's been fielding dozens of such overseas inquiries monthly, particularly from insurance companies .

Gesturing to swathes of decades-idle industrial waste ground north of the convention center, Dempsey says the challenge will be create living and working space in time.

Officials representing London's financial district, by many measures the world's biggest surpassing Wall Street, stress that their world is so vast and powerful that it can shrug off any job defections.

"London is a unique financial and regulatory professional services ecosystem. There is nothing like it anywhere else in Europe," said Miles Celic, chief executive of TheCityUK, a lobbying group that represents Britain's financial services industry.

Celic expressed confidence that the vast majority of 2.2 million British financial jobs, a third of which are in London, would adapt to whatever U.K.-EU relationship emerges .

Independent experts say London might be grossly underestimating losses.

A Brussels-based think tank, Bruegel, estimates that 35 percent of London's wholesale banking involves clients in other EU nations involving $1.9 trillion in euro-denominated assets — some 17 percent of the U.K. total under management — that might be obliged on regulatory grounds to exit Britain whenever an EU exit becomes reality.

Traveling with them, Bruegel has calculated, could be 10 percent to 15 percent of British-based account managers and traders.

Financial services proponents in France and Germany, the nations at the core of EU power, are gearing up their own capacity to shelter City of London migrants.

But the large numbers of U.S. banks with fully licensed subsidiaries already rooted in Ireland gives the Irish an edge, sharpened by the country's EU-low 12.5 percent rate of tax on corporate profits. France and Germany, by contrast, levy rates of 30 percent to 33 percent .

Bank of America's director of corporate banking in Germany, Nikolaus Naerger, told a Frankfurt conference Tuesday that the bank's Dublin base represented its "emergency default option" for Europe in event of a hard Brexit.