Mr. Conor O'Neill:

I will come in on that and Mr. Liston should feel free to jump in. In another sphere of work in Christian Aid, with our colleagues in Oxfam, Action Aid and others, we have done a lot of work on tax justice. We try to vindicate the rights of people in developing countries and we have mapped out in research we have published how those types of corporate structures can be used to siphon revenue from poor developing countries through Ireland and into places like the Cayman Islands and so on. That has been well ventilated in these Houses. This is relevant because an enormous amount of work - due to the amount of money we are dealing with being significant - that has gone into trying to register and track beneficial ownership and to make sense of those corporate structures. I have seen it done by academics and civil society organisations to an excellent standard. The revenue authorities across EU member states share information automatically, for example, and they have access to private company data that makes that far more effective. That issue, as it relates to this Bill, is the exact same issue in principle as it relates to everything else to do with regulation of corporate behaviour like how do we raise taxes from them and how we know who is paying what and where. It is a fundamental issue with part of the modern world but it is not specific to this legislation and it is absolutely possible.

The Deputy raised the hypothetical of a software company and I think Deputy Brian Brennan asked a good question in this area earlier. What we are trying to do is change corporate behaviour, because it is not the Irish State that is buying boxes of dates or facilitating rentals in the occupied West Bank, but companies or individuals. We think this can be meaningful because not only does it set the tone, but it totally shifts the risk decision a company has to make. If we imagine a supermarket buying in boxes of dates today, somebody in the purchasing team will be telling the management this is where they come from and the level of paperwork that goes with it. If this legislation is passed that shifts, because all of a sudden if you have an Israeli exporter that is trying to falsify the data or cannot show definitively this is not coming from an illegal settlement then that company has a decision to make about whether to run the risk of that produce being seized at a port or does it only deal in situations where it knows it is on sure ground. The same applies with a service. If this changes, the big, visible multinationals currently operating there know full well they would face criminal sanction and the incentive for the company changes. We do not expect them to be moral actors; companies will flow like water. They will just do their business and make their profit within the boundaries set by the law. It is changing the law that changes not the moral view of a company but its calculus of whether something is worth it. If the International Court of Justice, the ICC, the United Nations, the European Union and the Irish Parliament have made clear these settlements are totally illegal, a flagrant breach of international law, violation of the fourth Geneva Convention and are war crimes, is it worth it to trade with that entity as opposed to anywhere else in the world and take the risk? We think this shifts it further towards "No".