Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

With regard to the different points that have been put to me, I reiterate what I said to Deputy Boyd Barrett. We set our tax policy, be it corporation tax or any other policy, on the basis of what we judge to be the right thing for the economy overall and the long-term interests of the Irish taxpayer. Across the period in which we have made decisions like that, we have seen an increase in corporate tax receipts overall. This point is missing in the analysis that is being offered here. In 2014 corporation tax receipts were €4.6 billion. They grew to €6.9 billion. For this year we are currently expecting corporation tax receipts of €8.3 billion. We are collecting more corporation tax at the moment. One of the factors in this is changes that have been made over the last number of years in how we structure our corporate tax policy.

I have been asked how we can handle IP that moved here in the past. Again, I will emphasise two points. We are talking about the timing in which depreciation reliefs are run down. Overall this makes a big difference to the timing in which tax is collected. It is a timing issue around when we actually collect tax from companies. Alongside that, while much of the debate here is focused on a particular company, I have to consider that this is a tax policy I would have to set for every company located in Ireland. I would have to say to every company that has an intellectual property asset, regardless of its form, that Ireland would change how it taxed the assets the company had moved here in the past. It was my judgment, and my decision, that a policy such as that would undermine the predictability at the heart of our corporate tax offering, and which is essential to its competitiveness with all the change that is under way now.

Deputy McGrath asked about figures and I have some of them. I have the figures relating to the corporate tax reliefs that have been claimed but I believe the Deputy already has those. The other figures that I have available to me from our national accounts relate to the purchase of patents, which is part of the movement of intellectual property assets. Those figures are as follows: in 2014 it was €1.9 billion; in 2015 it was €8.3 billion; in 2016 it was €35 billion; and in the first half of 2017 it was €11 billion.