Mr. Matt Carthy:

Is the global picture changing? The dynamic absolutely is. As I mentioned, I have been a member of the committees in the European Parliament dealing with this issue.

There are a number of reasons this is becoming an issue. Governments are recognising that they are losing income at a time when citizens are being asked to pay ever increasing stealth charges and additional family taxes, whether it be on homes or whatever. There is increasing pressure on governments also to ensure corporations pay their fair share of tax. There is also an issue globally. An awful lot of people are asking themselves about issues pertaining to the injustice of tax avoidance by corporations. Nicolas Shaxson wrote a very good book in which he estimated or quoted someone else's figures to the effect that for every €1 western countries provide in development aid to Third World countries, our corporations deny those same countries €8. If we got tax justice right, we could contribute eight times more to the developing world. It would be fair, it would not be charity and it would not cost us as citizens a single penny.

For all of those issues, there has been a very welcome shift in dealing with this. We can have discussions around the measures. For example, when the CCCTB proposals were initially being put in place, tax avoidance had very little to do with it. It was a power grab. The latest package put forward is couched in the language of tax avoidance and put forward on that premise. The GUE-NGL group in the European Parliament, which Deputy Murphy will know very well, commissioned a report assessing the potential impact of CCCTB and found there were many questions. The report noted that in some cases, CCCTB would result in some companies paying less tax. There were a number of fundamental flaws in the Commission's package, even without going into the issue of tax sovereignty which, of course, was an issue for our own party.

As to whether Ireland is a tax haven, it does not matter what I think. The problem, from our point of view, is that lots of other people think so. Oxfam has repeatedly described Ireland as a tax haven. As a member of the committee dealing with tax avoidance, every report and book I have read and the majority of people addressing these issues at our hearings have cited Ireland as an example of bad practice. That is bad for us on a number of levels, including in terms of our international reputation, our capacity to withstand moves at EU level to harmonise taxation rates and, crucially, it is bad for those of us who want to protect and maintain foreign direct investment and encourage others to come.

The fact of the matter is that, right across the world, consumers and shareholders are demanding of their companies that they be squeaky clean when it comes to tax avoidance. It is fitting into the framework when companies decide where to locate. I do not want to be provocative, but it is like the child labour issue for our generation. Companies do not want to be associated with it. If a country has a reputation which is clouded at even the most peripheral level with the notion of tax avoidance, some companies will want to move away from it. I can understand at some level why people would think us taking the Apple case to court and adopting other measures might be necessary to protect foreign direct investment, but in the medium to long term those actions could in fact damage the economic model they claim they want to protect.