Michael Noonan (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The reality of the arithmetic is that Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and Labour have a very big majority in the Dáil and that is what they decided because it was in the best interests of the country.

Commissioner Vestager is a very impressive lady but she is on the other side of this argument and we are appealing against the decision made by her and her officials which affects Ireland, not on unknown grounds. In November or December we published the main legal grounds on which we were appealing and they are available publicly. I did not put them into my speech today because the committee already has them. They are the grounds for the appeal. We think we are on very solid grounds and we have the best of legal advice. It is a given that multinational companies organise their affairs to minimise their tax and maximise their profits but that is not the point here. The point is that the liability was not on Ireland to collect additional tax from Apple because it had collected everything due to Ireland from economic activity to create a profit in Ireland. That is the issue. How it was structured after that and whether it paid sufficient tax in other jurisdictions - it paid very little tax overall - is the problem of the mismatches in tax law between different jurisdictions. Clever tax lawyers can play one jurisdiction off against another. To say the responsibility for fixing all that rests on the shoulders of a small country is facile and we do not agree.