Mr. Jim Clarken:

I can answer the Deputy's question on impact. Without doubt, tax avoidance of this scale has a massive impact and we know it amounts to €100 billion in developing countries. It amounts to trillions of euro when one considers individual wealth as well as corporation wealth that has not been taxed in the places that it should have been taxed.

Let us remember, as I have tried to illustrate, the difference between a health service that works and one that works less well is people dying in huge numbers. Similarly, it means children not being educated from the ages of five years upwards or children dying. That is how serious this problem is. I have outlined the human face and impact of tax avoidance. It has a massive impact on the lives of ordinary people across the world. Tax avoidance must resonate as a justice issue. We need global corporations to be successful, innovative and produce great products and services in order that society at large will benefit.

Corporations once thought of themselves as organisations that were to contribute to society as opposed to just quarterly reporting on profit improvements. As was quoted, surely the moral contract with a society is the society where one is based. That is where it starts. When we see corporations in developing countries often not paying tax yet benefiting from the resources of that country, whether they be natural or human resources, and the benefits governments in those countries provide to them to make the money they want to make, there is a complete mismatch.

Our major concern is that the inequality growth we are seeing, and it is important that people understand it is getting worse year on year, is a huge impediment to development. We are fearful that it is an impediment to our ambition to eradicate extreme poverty, which might sound like a big dream but if we continue at the pace we have been going in the past 20 years we could do that. There is a real concern, and not just on the part of organisations like Oxfam but also the IMF, the World Economic Forum and other such organisations, that unless this is tackled head-on we will be looking at reversing some of the progress we have made rather than getting to the finish line. It has to be a priority for all of us.