Ms Morína O'Neill:

I will start off. I thank Deputy Durkan for his questions. In response to the first point on the important role of parliamentary oversight, I am glad to hear Deputy Durkan feels strongly about that, as we do. We agree on the necessity of looking at debt from an international perspective, not on a country-by-country basis, but the problem is that there is no internationally recognised mechanism for dealing with debt. Our approach is looking at countries to see which are suffering from high levels of debt distress. The European Unions states that a debt-to-GDP ratio any greater than 60% means countries are entering into debt distress or unsustainable debt levels that then challenge and inhibit equitable and sustainable development. Many of the countries of which we spoke today have debt-to-GDP levels upwards of 90%, and we feel duty bound to respond to those cases through our membership of the World Bank and the IMF.

On the tax justice question, we may need to separate out for a moment Ireland's corporate tax regime of 12.5% and the issue of global tax transparency. There is an issue - we are a low-tax regime - but many of the corporations here are paying a much lower effective tax rate. The figure for Apple was 2%. We were not talking about the 12.5%, which, we acknowledge, as the Department of Finance stated in its tax strategy of October last year, is an economic cornerstone. We realise that is current policy, but we are asking for tax transparency. How much tax are corporations paying? There are also the issues of country-by-country reporting, who are the beneficial owners of the profits, etc. I refer to the OECD policy agenda of cracking open the issue of tax and closing down, I suppose, the culture of secrecy whereby one could not see who owned companies, where the profits were made and where the taxes were paid, and to align those more closely.