Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The problem is, and the Minister of State did not really respond to this point, that there is nothing we can do apart from keeping the spotlight on them, to use the Minister of State's phrase. There is nothing we can do to compel them to give fair premiums and not to profiteer. There is nothing we can do to stop them just exiting the market whenever it suits them for whatever reasons they decide.

I put it to the Minister of State that there is probably not a lot we can do either to stop them cooking the books for when they are making losses and when they are making profits, because we know they can carry out creative accountancy with their internal operations, their parent companies and their subsidiaries and they can move money around, just as the likes of Google and Facebook do. I suspect that is what they have been doing to put pressure on us to do certain things which will increase their bottom lines. That is my belief, but aside from that, my point is that there is nothing we are proposing here that will prevent them from doing that.