Michael McGrath (Cork South Central, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and his officials to the committee. I will focus on two issues in the time available. The first is corporation tax, which the Minister addressed at length in his opening remarks. The numbers are staggering with approximately €10.4 billion in receipts in 2018. To put that in context, the Government predicted in 2015 that receipts in 2018 would be in the region of €5.5 billion. It has almost doubled. The report of Mr. Seamus Coffey in June 2017 stated corporation tax receipts could be expected to be sustainable over the medium term to 2020. At the time he was working off the 2016 figures, which were approximately €7.3 billion. We are up 40% on even those numbers. Given the growing dependence on the multinational sector and, in particular, on a small number of multinational companies to deliver these significant corporate tax receipts and the level of risk that poses to the public finances and the wider economy, is it time to review the sustainability of such receipts? I ask the Minister not to rule that out immediately but to instead consider the need for a further updated report looking beyond 2020 and taking into account the recent boom in receipts to examine the sustainability of corporation tax receipts over the next five to ten years.