Professor Frank Barry:

Needless to say, I would have a somewhat different perspective on it. Google is a brand name. It is not "Cyborg", the imaginary company that I came up with. The Google brand name is very valuable. That is why it sells advertising revenue because it has a spectacularly important brand name. The intellectual property, in order words, the ownership of that brand name, is owned presumably somewhere in the Caribbean and that brand name accounts for most of the profits that Google earns. That is the logic of it. To me, a Dunnes Stores cola is pretty much the same as a Coca Cola, yet a bottle of coke retails for €1 and Dunnes Stores was selling its cola at 20 cent last time I checked. The value of the difference is the value of the brand name. I am not going to debate with the Deputy on this because it is not my role to debate it, but that would be the argument as to why things are set up as they are. I would agree that it is not a perfect world and things could be changed but what is important to bear in mind are things that can be changed at a global level versus things that can be changed at the Irish level. At the Irish level we are very constrained in terms of the effective changes we can introduce. If we introduce changes that are damaging to the competitiveness of companies, they will leave and go elsewhere and that is the dilemma we face in trying to think what changes can we introduce.