Ms Jennifer Banim:

As Mr. Dalton has outlined, we are seeing a trend of co-location of intellectual property products held by multinational entities with a significant manufacturing, production or service operation, many of which are located in Europe or in Ireland. They are moving, relocating or transacting. They can do it in a variety of ways; they can move a whole company here that is dominated by intellectual property products, or they can have the Irish entity purchase or import intellectual property products. The Senator is right about the value of it and there is a science around it. There are accountancy standards around how companies value these products. The relocation or transfer of the actual purchase is neutral on GDP. The 26% level shift that we saw in 2015 referred to the relocation of whole balance sheets for a number of entities that had a large amount of intellectual property products associated with them. Contract manufacturing type activity was also associated with it. These were entities that had production outside of Ireland, a net value was added from that production and all of the value added production was attributable to Ireland under the standards. This is what drove the 26% shift.