Mr. Michael Tutty:

I will make a point that I was going to make earlier. I have been in the Irish public sector for a long time. We worried all along about the dominance of the multinational sector in terms of what we would do if multinational companies were to disappear and how they could be substituted with domestic enterprise. Over the years, the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation and its predecessors have tried to devise policies to reduce our dependence on multinationals and to build up the domestic system. Clearly they have failed to do this. Domestic activity is good, but it is not good enough to soften our dependence on multinationals. This is something that has been around for a long time. If anyone on the Deputy's side of the House can come up with good ideas for how to divert activity away from multinationals and towards domestic companies, that would be great.

The Revenue letter which says that all of this will be okay next year is couched in all kinds of qualifications. It starts off by referring to this as a volatile tax head. It then says that the forecasting error has ranged from -32% in 2009 to 23% in 2010. Of course it is now 57% or more. There is great uncertainty in this area and I do not doubt it will continue to fluctuate. It is too early for us to be able to say exactly what is behind the current fluctuation. The Deputy is right when he says the profits which are shown as being in Ireland do not always reflect the economic activity that is here. That is the most worrying aspect of the matter. It comes to the fore when we come through a base erosion and profit-sharing process, which tries to fix the tax in different countries in line with the activities in such countries.

The Deputy is right to raise these issues. The Fiscal Advisory Council, the Department of Finance and the Revenue Commissioners should be looking closely at them. Our warning is that we should not start spending this money until we know exactly what it is. It may be around for a long while or a short while. In the meantime, we should examine the reasons behind it and where the profits are coming from. Even the changed forecasts for profitability in the economy in 2015, as set out in the latest economic projections, do not reflect the level of profitability that is showing up in the corporation tax returns. We do not have the answers. We have the same sort of concerns as the Deputy on this issue.