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

That is a fair point. Largely, the discussion has been aired. I do not think our proposals are in any sense magicking money out of the air. We think it is entirely legitimate and justified to replace the USC, which was an austerity tax. Commitments were given to replace it, which is still a reason for very considerable anger among ordinary workers who saw their tax burden increase very significantly. That is a fact. The amount of tax paid by ordinary workers dramatically increased on foot of the USC. It still significantly dwarfs the tax contribution of corporations in the total amount paid. That is also a fact.

I contest what the Minister said about the percentage that corporations are paying in tax. I am curious to see the projections for 2022 if the Minister can provide them. The most recent figures, which are those for 2020, show €193 billion pre-tax profit for corporations, while the total of corporation tax paid was €11.833 billion. That equals 6.1%, not 10%, 11% or 12.5%. As the Minister knows, there are myriad tax reliefs available. The Committee on Budgetary Oversight is examining those reliefs at the moment. I call it the shadow budget of tax reliefs, credits and breaks from which corporations benefit. Those are never properly examined or listed in the budget documents. They roll over, year after year. Some of those arrangements may be justified but many of them are not. Some of those arrangements are never properly examined in respect of what benefit they are serving or what objective they are realising. One dramatic example in this year's budget to which I have pointed is the shocking increase in intra-group transactions. Single tax relief in the amount of €35 billion. It is, as we all know, about profit shifting. It is about one subsidiary of a big IT company charging another subsidiary whatever it wants to charge for the use of its own intellectual property. That allows such companies to shift their profits. We all know that is the case.

The Minister says that adopting our proposals would scare the horses and do untold economic damage and so on. Some of us challenged the double Irish loophole, which was the previous mechanism through which many of these profits were shifted, and that was closed eventually. Did that closure have a disastrous impact on the amount of tax revenue collected? The situation was quite the opposite. When the double Irish loophole was closed, the tax revenue to the State from the corporate sector increased. It was a part of a more general move across the world that the Minister is not taking into account. There is a growing awareness that these multinationals are making obscene profits and that there is a problem with this at many different levels. We are seeing one possible fallout from that in all the redundancies that are being made at the moment. Elon Musk, a man driven by ego and greed, can just decide that thousands of people are going to lose their jobs. That is the price we pay for letting these companies get that rich and for whole economies to be dependent on them. There is a long-term price to be paid, as well as the growing and gross inequality in the distribution of the world's wealth. Unless that is addressed in a serious way, there will be far more untold consequences.

I do not think we should give corporations all these tax breaks and reliefs. We should make them pay a minimum effective rate on their pre-tax trading profits. Before they get any reliefs, deductions or allowances, they should pay at least the 15%. I would go higher, frankly, but that would be the minimum I would suggest. They are not paying anywhere near that level of tax. The taxable profit is far less than the pre-tax profits because of all the reliefs, allowances and deductions they can make. They can effectively write their own tax bills. Our tax code allows for that. The situation for corporations is in stark contrast to that for, say, a cleaner who cannot do the same thing.

The Nevin Economic Research Institute, NERI, conducted a study on wages last year that might be worth looking into. These are the things that could be looked at in these kind of reports. The NERI study suggested that the gap between the lowest percentile of workers in this country in the context of earnings and the highest percentile is far greater than in any of the other high-income European countries. There is a very considerable difference. The gap is approximately twice the size of the gap in Sweden and some of the other Nordic countries. It is even greater than countries such as the UK and Germany. There is excessive inequity between the lowest and highest earners in this country and that needs to be addressed.