Mr. Rónán Hession:

Speaking from the Department's point of view, we do not have company-specific information. We are looking at what would be the implications of the Trump proposals, such as they are. We did not get lot of detail in the announcement. It was four very brief bullet points on corporation tax reform, including indicating a move to 15%, and sentiment in the US is this would be hard to achieve; a move to a territorial system, and the devil will be in the detail there; and a once-off repatriation, which would not affect our base. The most significant thing about the Trump tax reform proposals was they did not mention a border adjustment tax. If this were introduced, it would be a significant re-engineering of the US tax system with implications for everyone. It was in the original House Republican proposal. There was speculation it would be included. Public comments by President Trump, such as they are, have been quite ambivalent about it. It was interpreted as quite a significant omission from the announcement.

We continue to do our own analysis. We have met various staffers and other players in the US. The Minister, Deputy Noonan, was there and met the outgoing Secretary of the Treasury, Jack Lew, and members of his team.

We will continue to do our analysis. There is a limit to how far we can go with that without seeing the detailed proposals. In broad terms, it seems unlikely that they would go to 15%. We think a tax rate cut is a possibility, and probably somewhere in the low 20s is more achievable. From an Irish point of view, we are not necessarily worried about a tax cut of that order. With regard to the once-off repatriation, these are US profits and do not affect our base. If anything, it would clear the air about there being massive profits sitting offshore on the part of American companies and which are awaiting repatriation to the US.

We have seen some interesting analysis from some of the academics. Professor Ron Davies at the ESRI, for example, has done some work to show that once-off repatriation or even a rate cut could boost FDI figures. There was a once-off repatriation in 2004 where the money was brought back at quite low rates, approximately 5.5% compared with the 8.7% or 10% that are talked about now. The FDI figures for Ireland increased afterwards. This is not that surprising if one thinks about it from a common sense point of view. All of a sudden these companies have all this money available to them, so they invest it more or less in the pattern in which they have invested it up to now, which would include an FDI component. We are alert and watchful then, and we are doing what analysis we can. When the announcement came out, everyone felt a little bit starved of detail, other than the addition of a border adjustment tax. We will watch what comes out. The legislation will be important.