Mr. Derek Moran:

The Deputy is correct that international corporation tax is currently a major issue for discussion. We came under our biggest pressure on the corporation tax rate at the start of the crisis when, I will not call it a threat, but there was an observation that if we wanted help that this might have been a price to pay.

One of the fundamentals of the Irish economic model is that it is an exporting economy that relies on foreign direct investment and exports to the world. If we were going to recover, this had to be part and parcel of the formula. We have seen various tax harmonisation proposals that have come around, most notably the common consolidated corporate tax base proposal. I think there have been five or six iterations of this proposal over the years.