Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 11 May 2022

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and Covid-19 Vaccines: Discussion

Mr. Oliver O'Connor:

It may be but what I am saying again is that if we put that aside as we do with all investment, the value delivered would vastly exceed $100 billion. Similarly, it is open of course to governments and authorities to say we will have a situation in the future where we are prepared to invest money but there will be no intellectual property, IP, rights for any private investment company. That is fair enough. If that is what they want to do, that is fine. My only point was that as long as the public sector sets the rules clearly in advance and sticks to those rules, as they were set in the Doha Round that would be the most predictable and indeed order-based, rules-based type of environment in which you could have joint public and private investment. It is not a matter of disputing how much investment; clearly the investment has been made and it is good.

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