Mr. Matt McGann:

Mr. Cassidy covered most of it. On the Deputy's specific question, the other point to bear in mind is the extraordinary level of increases in corporation tax receipts we have seen, which have gone from less than €5 billion 2014 to heading above €21 billion this year. I think the receipts were at €12 billion in 2020. It has been €12 billion to €15 billion to €21 billion in two years.

The other point is the concentration risk. Half of that is coming from just ten large payers. We do not know who those payers are, as that is Revenue confidentiality. However, Revenue identifies that it is not the same ten every year. We know it changes slightly. It is a huge concentration risk. Because corporation tax receipts are now almost 25% of total receipts, that means one in eight of total tax receipts is coming from those ten large payers. That is not factoring in the income tax that is also associated with those multinationals.

On identifying it, that is in firm specifics and we are into confidentiality issues because it is such a small number of firms. That is why we took a more statistical approach in the paper we did in September. We can send it on to the committee or I can go through in boring detail how we estimated windfall. Essentially, the truth is that nobody can definitively say what the quantum of structural or potentially at-risk receipts is, which everybody acknowledges. We took a suite-of-models approach. We looked about five or six different ways at the potential windfall and we took the mid-range of those five or six different models. Based on that, we estimated that from last year’s receipts, the windfall could be in the region of €4 billion to €6 billion. For this year, we are talking about €9 billion and next year €10 billion of receipts that are potentially transient or volatile. This is where we then remove that new figure and take it out of the budget balance. Everybody is thrilled to get a new acronym, GGB*, under which, if you take out those windfall receipts, instead of a surplus, we have an €8 billion deficit. Of course it is great to get these receipts and they are not unwelcome. However, we have to be cognisant that there are not potential vulnerabilities building up within the public finances. As I alluded to earlier, that is what happened in the financial crisis, where we had a huge reliance on the property-related receipts. We lost one third of our tax revenues in two years.