Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The experience over many decades has been that is has been difficult to enable microbusinesses or SMEs to scale up sufficiently where they are getting seriously involved in exporting, which is where the added value is and is where they become more productive and of greater benefit by adding higher value jobs and so on. When plans were first announced to revise the indigenous enterprise strategy, it was presented as an effort to recast Ireland's industrial strategy but it was nothing of the sort. It struck me as something that the Taoiseach wanted to get off his desk before he left the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment. I think more elaboration is required in that document and by the Department and Enterprise Ireland about their ambitions for the scaling up of Irish enterprise for a number of reasons.

That moves me on to Mr. Coffey and his area of expertise.

I have taken a significant interest in his very important work on corporation tax in recent years in respect of the public's understanding of where we are coming from and where we are going and the inherent risks to our industrial strategy and policy, and to Exchequer revenues and jobs, potentially. We know the risks and they have been well ventilated here and elsewhere. We are aware of them and we speak about them ad nauseam. This is what annoys me about it because the expectation was that we would have a new industrial policy where we would consider how we would scale up our SMEs and work to make our business enterprises more productive, export-oriented and so on. There is no doubt but there are significant risks there and in the two pillar process we have signed up to relating to the OECD reforms. We have been repeatedly told by the Department of Finance that the likelihood is, by virtue of our signing up to those reforms, that we will lose, on average, €2 billion a year potentially to the Exchequer. I have never bought that. I do not believe that there is any real basis for that contention. I am not certain what are the current views of the witnesses on that. It is very uncertain and we know that 50% of all of those record receipts from the past year for corporation tax have now overtaken VAT in its significance, extraordinarily, under the tax headings. Does Mr. Coffey agree with the assessment that is being repeated from the Department of Finance, with minimal evidence, that there is a risk of a €2 billion per annum drop to our corporation tax base? I appreciate that there are many moving parts to this.