Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I would appreciate that. One would imagine that all of the companies with fewer than 250 employees were outside the scope. In that case, we are talking about €200 million under the research and development tax credit. If a 25% tax credit rate cost €200 million, I would have expected an increase to 30% to cost more than €13 million. I want to ensure that every company is availing of this credit. While I support the measure, we have argued for a long time that SMEs and micro-enterprises should get a 30% research and development corporation tax credit, but the rationale behind this measure is not about them. The rationale is ensuring that larger companies have the value of their credit maintained. That is a problem. It is not that I oppose the idea, but I oppose the thinking behind it. This should have been done for SMEs before now regardless. Some 1,400 businesses got a tax credit of €200 million last year at a rate of 25%. If that increased to 30%, one would expect the cost would increase by a further €40 million. I do not understand why it is not linear.