Mr. Neil McDonnell:

We know that, for all Deputies and Ministers, the cutting of a tape for a big new facility is always an attractive thing to do. It might be the opening of a big factory with 1,000 people, and while smaller companies do that every day, it is just for two or three employees.

To segue backwards into what the Deputy was just saying with Mr. Hughes, on the one hand, we would have a view that Ireland was absolutely correct to take a stand on the issue of BEPS and corporation tax because that is an issue of national sovereignty. Other countries could be deciding what our tax policy should be on something but I do not think they would like it if we decided what their VAT rates were, or whatever it might be. It is an important issue. We accept where we have gone on BEPS and pillar 2, which arrived very late in the day.

We spend an awful lot of time worrying about what rate some of these big companies pay in taxation without realising that some of these businesses are now larger in market valuation than a significant number of countries in the world, and they are exerting market power, political power and communications power that people really do not appreciate. I think states need to be in the headspace that the US Government was in at the back of the last century, when it had to break up certain oil companies. I am not picking on any particular one, but I think we are in a position now that some of these companies are so big that their impact and their mass of gravity in economies is something that legislators should be very worried about.