Ireland is mounting a vigorous charm offensive to lure thousands of financial jobs from London to Dublin, exploiting the growing uncertainty about Brexit and what it might mean for banking operations in Britain.

Irish officials say US banks and other non-EU financial firms worried about the future possibility of using London to do business in Europe are already scoping out the option of moving some operations to Dublin after Britain leaves the EU.

“Our approach is very clear, we will go after every single piece of mobile [non-finalised] investment,” says Martin Shanahan, the head of Ireland’s Industrial Development Authority, who has been touring the US and China to sell Dublin as a gateway to the EU.

“Undoubtedly there are more opportunities because of Brexit,” he adds. “You can be assured that any opportunities there are, Ireland will seek to take advantage of and we will be in the fray, as will others.”

Several European cities are jostling to court those businesses fretting that Brexit may disqualify British institutions from selling services into the EU. But while Paris is dangling new tax breaks for expatriates and Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Luxembourg are also making pitches, Ireland is presenting itself as the only English-speaking country in Europe that can offer continuity to banks in nearby London.

It has already built a reputation in back-office fund management operations. And several US banks, including JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citi, are either already established in Dublin or licensed to operate there. Citi indicated last week that decisions on relocations could be made early next year.

“The big question now is timing,” James Bardrick, UK country officer for Citi, which has 9,000 UK employees, told delegates at a conference in London. “How do we and when do we start making decisions … it could be in the first quarter of 2017.”

Last week, the Irish finance minister announced a tax relief programme designed to help foreign investors move staff from the US and elsewhere to Ireland is to be extended until the end of 2020.

It was part of an official “Getting Ireland Brexit Ready” programme announced on budget day that is designed to protect existing foreign investment and lure new business. Irish officials see new business as a possible consolation for the considerable economic and political hardships that Brexit will foist on the country.

The former Irish prime minister John Bruton says that though more work needs to be done on creating better conditions for banks, jobs will migrate westwards. “Will we get full HQs? I don’t know, but I do think we will definitely attract financial services,” he says.

There are already about 13,000 people employed in global fund administration in Ireland, and Rob O’Rahilly, a consultant who worked for JP Morgan for 20 years, reckons that could grow by 50%.

“Dublin should position itself to win or be the destination of choice for businesses it wants to attract that are forced to relocate out of the UK,” he says. “The attractions are that it is English-speaking, has flexible labour laws [and] the transportation links to the US are pretty good.”

He estimates that of the 400,000 banking jobs in the UK, between 100,000 and 150,000 could disappear after Brexit if Britain loses its “passporting” rights – the facility to sell services into the EU.

David O’Reilly, who runs Hampton Court Capital, an investment banking firm, and who moved to London in 2003, says: “I think it is very possible that some of the global investment banks … might reconsider about whether they should have so many people in London as we do now or should we move some of London people to Dublin or Paris.”

Good things come...

But Dublin faces huge challenges in reinventing itself as the EU’s premier English-language financial centre. There is a chronic shortage of property – residential and commercial – and an equal shortage of cachet. There are questions over regulation and whether Dublin can handle the sort of boomtown finance that brought it to its knees in 2010.

Few are predicting imminent departures, and the financial community in London is rather sceptical that companies will move wholesale out west.

“See that?” says a banking executive tilting his head towards Citibank’s 45-storey headquarters in Canary Wharf. “There’s 1.2m square feet in that tower alone,” he says. “Can Dublin do that? Can Frankfurt do that?” he asks. “There is not a chance that a Goldman Sachs or a HSBC or a Citi, what we call the ‘bulge bracket banks’, are going to move lock, stock and barrel to Dublin or Paris or Frankfurt,” he adds. “There just isn’t the space.”

Just around the corner having a lunchtime drink, two private bankers are equally dismissive. “Dublin just doesn’t have the cachet for our clients,” ventures one. “It has no historic banking credentials like Geneva or London,” he says, adding that these facts do not go down well with Middle Eastern sheikhs or Russian oligarchs.

But that doesn’t deter Shanahan. Within hours of the EU referendum result, he had fired off letters to 1,200 companies extolling the benefits of Ireland as a gateway to Europe.

“Do I think Ireland has an opportunity to attract a big bank? Yes, I do,” he says. “We can attract front, middle and back-end office activities.” But, he adds, “the notion that we’re going to see 5,000 staff decamp overnight is not going to happen”.

Consultant Ken Owens, the Brexit partner at PwC in Ireland’s Financial Services Centre, reckons it will be two years “before we see bums on seats” from any dislocated operations.

Clients he is working with are first establishing their level of exposure to Brexit, then making plans for the worst-case scenario. One client, he says, has a checklist of 27 factors to compare various alternatives to London. These will include office space, infrastructure, language, the tax regime, ease of getting work visas for staff, the law, the local talent base, and the foreign investment track record, as well as proximity to London.

On all of these Ireland scores well. A recent PwC report shows Ireland has gone up the rankings to overtake Luxembourg on a basket of factors.

Owens believes the most obvious candidates for moving will be those working in fund management, rather than investment banking. Ireland is already a significant administrator of funds, second only to Luxembourg in Europe, he says.

It also looks attractive from a legal point of view. If Britain leaves the single market, contracts and accounts may have to be rewritten to comply with single market regulations. Nearly all banking contracts are based on British common law rather than the civil law system of Germany or France.

As Ireland’s legal system is also based on common law, document changes would be minimised. “Banks would be very comforted by that,” says Owens. “Repapering would be a legal and administrative nightmare.”

It’s not just financial firms that might look west. Marina Donohoe, the EU and northern Europe director of Enterprise Ireland, says she has been fielding calls from other companies interested in the opportunities offered by being based in Ireland. “We are getting calls from people who are saying that they have been here for 10 years, ‘I have got an engineering business, it is in the Midlands, I am employing and I am now thinking of moving lock, stock and barrel to Ireland, what is your interest in that?’” she said.

...to those who wait

Ireland has decades of experience luring multinationals such as Google, Facebook and Pfizer to Dublin, with its low tax rates and anglophone, well-educated labour force.

But capacity is a problem. The latest statistics from Savills in Dublin show there is just 951,956 sq ft (88,440 sq metres) of vacant space in the city centre, the financial centre and the docklands area. Its tallest commercial office block is a 14-storey Google building, modest by London standards.

“Ireland needs to have more vision,” says one expat executive who has been involved in a post-Brexit advisory group. “It needs to say, ‘if you want 1m square feet, it’s coming up; if you want schools we can get them.’ It’s a chicken and egg situation when banks haven’t made decisions, but it needs to show the world it’s bold and determined.”

Then there is the question of banking regulation. Sources at the Irish Central Bank say they won’t accept shell companies that just come to Dublin and put a brass plaque on a wall. After the crash of 2010 the rules have been tightened and due diligence by the regulator could take six months – but more likely a year – to go through the regulatory process before being licensed to operate.

There is also scepticism that the central bank could cope with a boom in banking after the disaster of 2010 showed how much toxic debt was able to mount in a lighter touch regulatory regime.

Deep down, Ireland is torn by this play for business. For the purposes of peace and trade, it wanted its nearest neighbour to stay in the European Union. As one senior official says: “At the end of the day there is going to be more pain than gain, it’s as simple as that.”

Shane Hickey contributed to this report