Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Commissioner and her colleagues and thank her for accepting our invitation. She said this morning and previously - we also heard this from other Commissioners and spokespersons - that the European Commission respected Ireland's sovereign right to determine its own corporation tax system and that she saw this very much as a separate issue in the application of state aid rules, but I put to her the suspicion among many, but not all, representatives in Ireland - they include me - that those rules are being used as a veil to undermine Ireland's corporation tax system. I say this because I look at what the Commission as a whole is doing. Only last week the Commissioner's colleague, Commissioner Moscovici, was here selling the virtues, as he saw them, of the common consolidated corporate tax base, CCCTB, whereby the way taxable profits were calculated would be determined under new rules, the allocation of profits across countries would be determined at EU level and Ireland, for example, would not be allowed to have three tax rates. From my point of view, in the context of this debate, there is a strong suspicion that there are elements within the Commission that are seeking to undermine Ireland's corporation tax system.

On the state aid finding and the issue of selectivity, I want to ask the Commissioner about how the Commission reached the conclusion that the Revenue Commissioners had applied selective treatment to Apple which was not available to any other company operating in Ireland. That was the only basis on which it could have reached the conclusion that there had been the provision of state aid, that it was selective, preferential and not available to anybody else. Can she tell us how the Commission reached that conclusion and how it compared, for example, the treatment of Apple with that of other companies?