Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

I apologise to the two Ministers for only arriving now. I welcome them both to the committee. I apologise if the two issues I wish to raise have already been covered and if they have, we can move on. I would like to get Mr. Ó Muilleoir's thoughts on tax. A substantial amount of the tax base in Ireland has been eroded and commercial property here has become more or less tax free for institutional investors and the vulture funds, which caused a very serious erosion of the tax base, have now been closed down. They bought about €40 billion of assets and while what they were doing was completely legal, if the tax avoidance had continued the State would probably have lost out on about €15 billion to €20 billion. Those are very big scales. An example of that, which concerns both the North and the South, is Project Eagle. The 2015 accounts, which were filed in recent days, show a taxable profit, by my calculations based on their accounts, of approximately £168 million and on that they paid £1,596. From memory, it was a 0.001% tax rate. There is some context for this that is affecting both the North and the South. When George Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer he brought in very sweeping tax breaks, which may have worked for England or at least for London and, therefore, fiscally for England, to some degree.

I would like to hear Mr. Ó Muilleoir's view on the impact of that for Northern Ireland. One school of thought is that the UK will become very tax competitive and then the North can compete with the South, the North will attract in multinationals and we will get a decent base and while the rate might be quite low, the base will rise and there will be people at work and decent jobs. Another view is that what is going on is a race to the bottom. George Osborne, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, accelerated that very substantially and an incoming US President has declared that he will slash corporation tax rates in the US. The current Chancellor of the Exchequer in the UK has signalled he will cut corporation taxes further. What is the likely impact of that for the North with respect to fiscal stability, infrastructural development, having public funds and for job creation? Is it something the Mr. Ó Muilleoir welcomes? Is it something he thinks might be a necessary evil or that he thinks might be quite dangerous in that is it destabilising and eroding the tax base?