John Deasy (Waterford, Fine Gael)
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That is fair enough. I accept where Mr. Shanahan is coming from - that competitiveness has improved and it took a dip - and I take what he is saying with regard to these companies. My opinion is that in talking about tax avoidance, which, effectively, is what this scheme was, I am not bothered too much about what others think of our international reputation when it comes to attracting companies to our shores because other countries do other things to attract companies into their jurisdictions and have been doing so since the year dot. When one asks a CEO of a company about a tax avoidance scheme, which it has availed of and which brought it to this country in the first place in many respects, he or she may not verbalise the impact of this entirely.

Moreover, my personal experience has been that while it is something of which such people will avail and use to the full, they will not talk to a journalist and agree it absolutely was why they came here and why they are staying here. The ESRI carried out a pretty good study on this issue and the analysis it came up with, having surveyed the companies, was that had Ireland a European Union average rate of 22.5%, and the number of multinationals between the years 2005 and 2013 would have been 60, not 130. The ESRI considered four measures of Ireland's corporation taxation, namely, the policy rate, the mean effective average tax rate, EATR, the total tax rate and the cross-border EATR. Ultimately, the ESRI's analysis was that even were one to bring the rate down to 15% as opposed to 12.5%, some 20% of those companies that had been attracted here previously under the old regime would not have come. I do not state that we have a problem and am not getting into the rights and wrongs of it. I do not really care if commentators say it is wonderful, Ireland is very fair, it is good and so on. The potential impact here worries me because companies will not verbalise this, although they may do so behind closed doors to a certain extent. I believe we have a problem and if we identify a problem in the coming months with regard to potential investors, we need to do something about it.