Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
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The conclusion of the paper that the Minister of State referred to that the effective rate was 10.7% was heavily contested, and I do not accept for one second that such is the effective rate.

The introduction to that paper sets out the incredible spectrum of different effective rates depending on how one chooses to calculate it. They go from the 2.2% rate from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis to the EUROSTAT or so-called implicit rate, which is estimated at 5.9% for Ireland. I do not accept 10.7% as a credible estimate of the effective rate precisely because, as I explained earlier, it is after the deductions that have been the mechanism through which these companies have aggressively avoided tax using intellectual property and patents. That method of calculating the effective rate comes in after all that has been taken out of their taxable income, and one ends up with something that looks like 12.5%, but it is following the deduction of billions of euro in profits under the heading of trade charges.

I also believe, as I stated earlier, that it was a huge gap in the remit of that investigation into the effective rates that we did not bring some of the companies at the centre of this controversy in here to be questioned in detail about their tax affairs. We did not get to the bottom of what was going on with effective tax rates. The public still has the right to know the truth about this matter.