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

To me, that is tax avoidance and it is big multinational corporations essentially writing their own tax bill. The Government facilitates that. It has been battled in courts and all the rest of it but at least some people in the EU Commission believed we were giving tax rulings to certain companies in order to allow this kind of thing to happen. It is scandalous. Our argument is that the headline rates, whether 12.5%, 15% or, as we would favour, at least 20%, must be effective and levied on gross trading profits. Reliefs would only kick in after those corporations have to pay, as an absolute requirement, a minimum amount of tax on the profits they generate.