Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I support Deputy Joan Burton's amendment which is a sensible one. It proposes that we examine the merits of having such an effective tax rate.

I wish to comment on and question the Minister's current position on a number of matters. Listening to him one would think the Government was great in leading the charge on the issue of tax transparency in the global process and whatnot and that it should be patted on the back for all of the things it has done. I have mentioned the OECD report on which the Government continues to rely, but only one country in the world, Trinidad and Tobago, is non-compliant. All of the rest are either compliant or partially compliant. In addition, it is only about the transfer of tax information. It does not delve into the issue with which the Minister is dealing - State-sponsored tax evasion. What he is doing, with the support of Fianna Fáil, is engaging in State-sponsored tax evasion. As I said about the previous amendment, it allows companies to pay €250 in tax on profits of €9 million. It allows a company such as AIB in which we have large a shareholding to record profits of €1.5 billion and pay no corporation tax. If that is not State-sponsored tax evasion, I do not know what is.

The issue is that the Government has been dragged kicking and screaming on many of these matters. Yes, it closed the double Irish, but did it really do so? It will still be in place until 2020. That should not be forgotten if we wish to be accurate about all of the information available. Anybody who used the double Irish can continue to use it until 2020. However, the Government did it under massive pressure from us in the Opposition - I will not rehash all of was said to the effect that nothing could be done - and international pressure. With regard to the stateless companies which I wrote legislation to close, the Government denied time and again that it had the ability to close them. Then it had to do it because the CEO of Apple gave sworn testimony before the US Senate that he had done a deal - I was going to say a dirty deal - with the Irish authorities to reduce its tax liability to single digits. At the time he referred to a figure of 2%. Both he and the head of tax, Mr. Bullock, gave that sworn testimony and there was an international outcry that Ireland was doing this. What did we do? We eventually closed the stateless companies. It was known to the authorities here that they were operating in the State.

Regarding the black list the Minister mentioned, does he now support the Commission's view that there should be a black list? Does he also now support public country by country reporting? I remind him, if he needs to be reminded, that he and his colleagues in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil voted in the Dáil last year to block an EU directive that would have required public country by country reporting, not privately or what takes place in the information being shared by revenue authorities. It is the public part of that information which relates to companies with a turnover or profits of €750 million. The Minister, with his colleagues in Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil, voted against the European directive.

At the time the Government argued that the Commission should not have a role as regards black lists which was an issue which should only be determined by national parliaments. Does the Minister support that view? The Irish Parliament, against the wishes of Sinn Féin, Solidarity and a number of other smaller parties, voted to use the provisions of the Lisbon treaty to fly the flag of subsidiarity and argued that the European Commission did not have the right to introduce the directive which was related to tax transparency. The Minister should not try to pretend that the Government is leading the charge in any of this. It tried to block the European Commission directive on public transparency which sought to provide for country by country reporting. Imagine if it had come in; we would have been able to see where the taxes of Apple or other larger multi-national companies were being paid. This is State-sponsored tax evasion, but there is nothing illegal about it because the Government is in charge.

Big companies can engage in tax evasion because of Governments such as the one of which the Minister is a member. He can sit before this committee and justify the banks not having to pay tax for the next 20 years. Companies which record profits running to millions of euro can use vehicles that allow them to reduce their tax liability to €250. Ireland has opened the door to intellectual property and intangible assets being placed onshore. This allowed Apple to write-off billions of euro in tax. This Finance Bill will ensure Apple will not pay any of these taxes because the Minister is ensuring any of the intellectual property placed onshore until the date of the budget may be used as a capital allowance against profits. That is what he is doing. We can talk about competitiveness and so on, but I have a responsibility to spell it out that this is State-sponsored tax evasion.

I am sick of hearing politicians on "Morning Ireland" or other radio and television programmes tut-tutting about these companies getting away with blue murder when they sit on the finance committee and vote through legislation that enables them to do precisely that. If it was illegal, those doing it would be behind bars, but it is perfectly legal because people like the Minister, with his friends in Fianna Fáil, allow legislation to be drafted in a way which enables multinational corporations and the elites in society not to pay their fair share of taxes. Does the Minister now support the European Commission in introducing a black list of tax havens? Does he support the European Commission's directive on public country by country reporting?