Mr. Liam Lynch:

Perhaps I should explain the background to this a little further. Within the BEPS process and in the context of action on treaty abuses one of the questions raised was whether a limitation on benefits clause should be inserted into the treaty. Whether a company qualifies to access the treaty would be dependent on where the company is owned. For example, if a company were entirely or more than 50% owned within the signatory state it would qualify for treaty benefits. That is the basic premise of this. In the US, this type of limitation on benefits clause, with a number of exclusions, applies. To make it work, the clause in terms of provisions runs to many pages in the Ireland-US treaty. It can work for very large economies from that perspective. The fear is that if, when dealing with a small economy like Ireland, one applies this across the board because many Irish operations are owned outside of Ireland - even small operations would have foreign capital coming in - if they want to trade internationally and cannot access the treaty because of their ownership they are at a disadvantage to companies of larger countries.