Professor Jim Stewart:

I certainly think so for US companies but as I said in my introductory remarks, if we look at a distribution of tax statistics we would find very varying amounts with some companies paying quite a lot of tax - there are companies which pay 12.5% in actual cash tax payments. There is quite a spectrum but I would say it is reasonable because the aggregate data is dominated by the very big firms, one of which had a rate of tax of 0.5%. That is a huge whack of multinational companies' profits in Ireland and they are paying 0.5% and other companies are paying a bit over their 3% or 4% which will average out to about 2%.