Ms Anne Gunnell:

For reasons of taxpayer confidentiality, I am not privy to information about who claims tax expenditure like that. Only the Revenue Commissioners would know that. Multinationals around the country are attracting these key executives so it does not necessarily involve Dublin Bay South. It could involve Cork, Galway, Limerick and other places around the country. I understand what the Deputy is saying. It goes back to the point that our tax expenditure can contain this inherent inequity if we are targeting a certain cohort of taxpayers but we need these people here. As that specialist skill is not available in Ireland, we need to attract these people to support the growing operations of multinationals that are basing their investment here and, ultimately, the spillover of that into suppliers and other companies that interact with those operations. That is where we see the merits and benefits of that approach.

We do not have any figures on the cost of extending the research and development tax credit to outsourcing. Research and best practice in countries like Germany recommends as much partnering as possible, as do the OECD and the European Commission. We do not have figures relating to outsourcing and we do not have direct comments from universities about whether they would have the capacity to do that. However, I am sure they would welcome that kind of collaboration.