Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

To be clear, I am fully aware the figure is not the taxable profit. Indeed it is precisely the point I make year after year. There are gross profits and then there is a myriad of tax reliefs, deductions and allowances that write down the taxable profit. That is the problem. Workers get a few tax credits but they do not see the level of write-down in what is taxable in their income that these corporations get.

The figure for 2020 pre-tax profits was €193 billion. The taxable income after all the loopholes was €110 billion. This is a massive write-down of what was taxable. Workers do not get anything like that in terms of the deductions and allowances that are available to them. The effective rate is about 6.1%, so it is very important to look at what the gross pre-tax profits are. We can then get a sense of what these companies are earning, which is astronomical. It is now up to, and this is a newsflash, €348 billion projected. You project for next year and it will be up to €383 billion, but the Minister estimates that, this year, they will only pay €21 billion in tax when a 12.5% tax on that would give us €40 billion. Even if you allow for a few legitimate allowances, it would be very considerably higher than the €21 billion. Given how precarious these companies have now shown themselves to be, surely now is the time to get in and get what we can off them from a tax point of view to invest in developing industry and jobs that will actually be sustainable in the long term.

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