Mr. Seamus Coffey:

----- and wine which are produced in France but sold elsewhere. The net effect was a reallocation and the overall impact on French corporation tax revenues was modest for those proposals.

The Deputy asked who has benefited from the profit increase in recent years and whether this has gone to the workers. Many of the changes the first round of the BEPS proposals have introduced have not been necessarily an increase in corporation profits, but a reduction in corporation profits that were declared in the pure tax haven jurisdictions - and there are tax havens out there - with no income or corporation taxes. These are jurisdictions where the companies have no substance and it was simply unrealistic to say that they could be locating profits in them. The first rounds of BEPS proposals were about limiting the ability of companies to declare profits in jurisdictions where all they had was a brass plate company.

Some of that profit has now been declared in Ireland where the substance is and it has added to the profit figures the Deputy has suggested. However, the biggest increase in profits would be in the multinational sector. I would imagine that is driving a large part of that increase from €40 billion to €140 billion as the Deputy highlighted. The multinational sector is the best-paying sector in Ireland. I do not think the Deputy can suggest that the workers there do not benefit. They are the companies generating the profits and they are also the companies that are paying their workers the most.

The Deputy's final point was about tax loopholes. I have done a second report on corporation tax. Some of those changes have been introduced with more to be introduced from the start of next year. There will be changes to our transfer pricing rules and other things set out in the roadmap the Minister for Finance has published. Some of the problems in Ireland's corporation tax regime are being addressed and may also be contributing to some of the additional receipts we are collecting. That is all entirely outside the remit of the fiscal council, but I thought I would deal with some of the points the Deputy made.

Someone else might wish to pick up the housing issues which is also potentially outside our explicit mandate.