Mr. Seamus Coffey:

Yes huge, because we are a peripheral country. The economic literature suggests that one way that peripheral countries can attract investment is through having lower taxation than core countries with larger markets. If that advantage is to be removed, as this proposal would suggest, it would prove quite difficult to attract this high value investment to Ireland. We have a reputation for delivering. Many of the pharmaceutical companies have been here for 20 or 30 years, spending hundreds of millions of euro on plants that operate efficiently with little down time and do what the companies want them to do. If the tax advantage is taken away, however, they will consider alternatives.