Mr. Gary Tobin:

Yes. As far as we are concerned, all companies in Ireland, be they big or small, are fully chargeable to corporation tax of 12.5% on the profits of their trading activities in Ireland. This applies equally to multinationals as it does to Irish-owned companies. They are treated in the same way.

On the question of which country is a tax haven or not, unfortunately I was only able to listen to some of Professor Barry's contribution yesterday. He is my old economics professor and I always find him highly entertaining and very interesting and informative. However, part of his point was that the term "tax haven" is so loosely bandied about now that it is almost meaningless. I watched a "Panorama" programme on Tuesday evening called, "Tax, Lies and Videotape", where a BBC reporter asked a British tax minister whether the UK is becoming a tax haven. Under no circumstances do I think that Ireland or the UK are tax havens. The OECD general secretary was in Ireland last week to launch the OECD survey and he made the point that language tends to be very loosely used around terms like "tax haven". He was also making the point that Ireland cannot in any way be regarded as a tax haven.