Seán Crowe (Dublin South West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are all very welcome. I thank them for their campaigning work on tax justice and for all the research they have done in this area. They are playing a hugely significant role. We all collectively use their figures and a lot of their research.

In the past week, academics at the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of Copenhagen released a report entitled The Missing Profits of Nations. It estimates that foreign multinationals shifted €90 billion corporate profits to Ireland in 2015. I do not know if the witnesses are aware of the research. It suggests that the amount involved was more than that for all the islands of the Caribbean combined and well ahead of Singapore, Switzerland and the Netherlands. The report measures the extent of profit shifting to avoid paying tax by multinationals around the world and finds that for every $1 spent on wages in this State, $8 of profit is declared here, which is approximately 16 times the average of other jurisdictions where profits are not routinely shifted. That gives a sense of what was going on in 2015. Did the witnesses see the research and what is their opinion of it?

It is also interesting that in 2015 - the year on which the research focused - the Fine Gael-Labour Government introduced a capital allowance deduction of up to 100% on intellectual property, which was clearly designed as a mechanism to replace the criticism of what was going on in relation to the double Irish scheme which was being used by the tech giants to pay obscenely low rates of tax. We have heard about the fallout from that and the impact it has had on reputation.

The Government recently launched its Global Ireland 2025 campaign, which, again, is supposedly designed to improve our global footprint. Do the witnesses agree that we can never be seen as a global leader on issues of world importance, or even as responsible global citizens, until we bring about real change in this area that would bring our so-called tax dodging schemes to an end?

When the committee was preparing its report for Irish Aid, I spoke on policy coherence for development. I see it as a contradiction that one arm of the State is doing positive work internationally while the other arm is undermining that work. That is happening. I presume the witnesses would agree there is a growing realisation of Ireland's tax system and that some companies are using Ireland as a tax haven, which is undermining our status.

Deputy Maureen O'Sullivan touched on the issue of capacity building, budgets and the supports we give developing countries and other countries in that regard. A difficulty I have as a spokesperson on foreign affairs is that Irish Aid come in here every year and we get a breakdown of where it spends money and so on but it is basically a graph. We do not get any detail on that. We give developing countries, particularly the opposition parties, support in terms of capacity building so that they can scrutinise budgets and so on, but we do not do that here. I do not believe this committee has that capacity to scrutinise. The Department said it will look at that. I realise it is one of those questions that is a bit skewed but I believe it is central to what we are trying to do. If we expect other countries to try to follow a particular model, we should be doing the same here if we are serious about scrutinising every euro spent in terms of Irish Aid. We are all great supporters of the work being carried on, so it would add to the work of the committee and to the transparency of the work Irish Aid is doing if we had that because there are concerns about where some of the money is being spent, not necessarily the bilateral funding but the multilateral and basket funding, and whether it goes to the right areas. I would be interested to hear the witnesses' comments on that.