Mr. Fergal O'Brien:

I am happy to comment on that as well. In regard to winners and losers in corporate tax and everything in terms of what we see across the business base, the Deputy is right. We would agree with the IFAC estimate that we could well see corporate tax revenue hitting €20 billion this year and it is not that long since the figure was €4 billion or €5 billion. That situation reflects a couple of things. First, the engine of this economy with 2.5 million people at work is performing really strongly and I think that gives us the resources now to have choices to help those who need support during this crisis. Most of what one sees in the corporate tax revenue for this year is in the rearview mirror and that is the economy of last year. Many of those companies probably did quite well during the Covid period, whether they were technology, medical or pharmaceutical companies or related companies. Some sectors of our economy did really well and Ireland did well out of those sectors doing well globally. Right now, there are very few winners in this economy. The winners are in a different part of the world and that is the reality of energy inflation. When it comes to our energy companies and the very small number of companies that will have some potential upside with the way energy markets are working at the moment, clearly we are going to see an EU framework to address that in a co-ordinated way across the region, which I think is a sensible thing to do. We know from some of our members where they may be benefitting in one sector of their energy business, be it wind or whatever, then they have offset costs in other sectors where they have not passed through the full economic cost and full energy inflation costs that they have been facing. I do not think that we are going to get very large-scale revenue from whatever the EU framework will be on the energy side. The much bigger picture has been the strength of the corporate sector generally but we will not have corporate winners in the Irish economy from what we are facing right now.

That was from a different phase of the global economy. Even if we did not have this terrible war in Ukraine, we would have had inflationary problems because we created so much money in the global monetary system and from a fiscal policy perspective during Covid. We would have had inflation anyway. Do we have a high cost of living in Ireland? We do, but we also have very high income levels and relatively high salaries compared to the rest of Europe that drive the cost of doing business, especially in labour-intensive sectors.

The challenge is to address the accelerated cost of living but, from our perspective, we will not see winners in the business community from inflation. This is a tax on the entire economy that predominantly comes from energy-producing nations. Businesses in Ireland will not benefit from the energy price surge we are seeing coming through globally.