Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

I will not labour the point I have made. I thank Deputy Rock for endorsing the spirit of the amendments. While I have no doubt about how conscientious the Minister of State, Deputy Halligan might be in these matters, future Ministers may not be so conscientious. It is helpful for the Minister to have information that breaks down who it is that benefits from a particular measure or from the tax benefit for these companies. It would be helpful if Ministers, others who are not Ministers and for the public to have access to that information so they can assess whether they think this is a good measure and whether the tax benefits conferred are value for money for the public, as against the value of other measures.

The area of corporate tax is, to put it mildly, opaque. There are a lot of tax breaks out there. I know that pertains to Revenue but when one gets this certificate then one is going to get the tax break and the two things are connected. I do not have the figures to hand but it is worth saying, and I said it on Second Stage, gross pre-tax profits in Ireland for corporations are in the region of €95 billion. By the time we take out all the allowable allowances, deductions and tax breaks, the €95 billion goes down to around €65 billion in taxable income. That is in the region of €30 billion to €40 billion worth of loopholes, tax breaks, incentives, deductions, allowances or whatever one wants to call them. I believe the public and the public representatives need to have more information about these in order to understand them. They need to be transparent and readily available. I am a member of the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and in the run-up to Finance Bills and budgets, all members and parties must think about whether these are good measures to benefit the public interest. The more information we have the better.