Mr. Brian Keegan:

I spend a lot of my time trying to teach tax. From that point of view, nothing would suit me better than a common consolidated corporate tax base, CCCTB. It would be fantastic, in theory, to have a common system where everybody knew exactly where they stood in terms of taxation. The system has two fatal flaws. First, because it would be centralised to Brussels it would not give Oireachtas Éireann the kind of flexibility it might need to change the situation to meet a different economic circumstance. Second, because the tax arbitrage is all about mismatches and because CCCTB is effectively an EU-based system, it does not address a huge part of the problem. I mean the mismatch between the likes of countries on the far side of the Atlantic and countries in the Far East. One has a local solution to a global problem. The upshot of that might be that those who are involved in the local solution might ultimately do this. Philosophically, I have no particular difficulty with the scheme. My concerns about it are practical.