Mr. Niall Cody:

All companies carrying out research and development, whether they are indigenous or foreign owned, are entitled to the same basis. It is the same system. I do not agree with the Chairman that their effective rate is 2%, 3% or 4%. The Department of Finance has published figures and the effective rate of the Irish operation is 12.5% and then the research and development credit is the biggest reduction. There are published figures that suggest that. I think it is set out at the start of our corporation tax review. The main statutory CT rate in Ireland is 12.5% with the effective tax rate for 2015 provisionally calculated at 9.8%. This represents a marginal increase on the rate of 9.7% estimated for 2014. Due to the nature of various tax reliefs and credits, an effective rate of tax will always be lower than a statutory rate. The paper that is based on is a technical paper published by the Department of Finance in 2014 which looks at the effective tax rate for multinationals and the rest of the corporations. When people talk about the low rate, what they are doing is applying the rate as against their worldwide income. That is the debate that goes on.