Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

The vulnerability is heightened now because the race to the bottom on corporate tax has intensified. I do not think anybody would dispute that. Whether one thinks it is good or bad, and I think it is very bad and dangerous, it has definitely intensified. The lights are flashing even more brightly in terms of our potential vulnerability. I do not know what Professor Lane thinks about that.

The other interesting thing in what Professor Lane said, which struck me very strongly, is about the value ascribed to intellectual property. It seems to me that that is a political debate which needs to be had but is not being had. It is about how much value is put on intellectual property as against sales, many of which are done here or in Europe, or the manufacturing process, because they are all different things. That is a highly political argument. It suits a certain political view, or corporate view for some companies, to say that all the value is in the idea. One could easily say that it is not really, because the idea without a product or sale does not mean anything at all. Is one of the ways we could lessen the vulnerability on this to be to the forefront, which we are not, in arguing for some sort of international, not just European-wide, consolidated tax base where we assign, and have a serious debate about, relative value of intellectual property versus other parts of the production chain?