Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The explanation for the surge in revenue in 2015 is still very light. This was part of a sequence of events that caused tremendous reputational damage to the country in terms of leprechaun economics, and the witnesses have only really accounted for €200 million of the surge in the context of companies that were able to use losses previously, yet there was a €2.3 billion surge. Given the reputational damage done and the fact that the Department scrambled to give an explanation at the time, is there a better sense that the Department will be able to predict future surges?

We have had this discussion before. Surely lessons should have been learned from the middle part of the last decade when the Department was not able to predict surges then. Here we are in a growing economy, in terms of taxation receipts, and we have a very weak explanation for the surge and for the Department's inability to predict it was coming.