Professor Stephen Kinsella:

I would like to elaborate slightly for the Deputy. When we think about macroeconomic risks, the way we think about it is that everything is connected. One is not bashing the multinational sector except to say that if conditions change and it is more acceptable and more profitable for them to leave, they will. I was in Limerick in 2009 when Dell left and 4,000 jobs were gone. If that were to happen again on a larger scale we would see a vast budget deficit, comparable to the economic crisis of 2007-2008. Right now, when times are good and the economy is going well, things are growing, as we would expect, we must build up our indigenous capacity. The Deputy gave Mercedes as an example. Mercedes is a perfect example of something in that it is a company that spent a century developing, subsidising, building and creating a manufacturing capability in Germany. There are many other examples like it. We do not have as many examples here. We know that the 21st century is going to be characterised by ideas and people being able to take ideas and make them real in the economy. They can do that in Silicon Valley or in Limerick. In both cases, people just need a laptop and an idea. They tend to take that knowledge from the places where they learn it and most of those places are in the multinational sector. That is where the high levels of productivity are. The research shows it is effectively like a gated community. When workers go in there they tend not to go back out to the domestic economy, which means that if they leave, that knowledge and those skills are gone. I agree that we need to spend money and think carefully about how to nurture our own indigenous economies but I would not shy away from recognising the risk, and to be fair the Department of Finance does recognise the risk, that a vast shortfall in corporation tax revenue could cause us, were things to go badly for them. If you were running a business and most of your revenue came from three or four customers, you would recognise that the fortunes of those three or four customers were of direct benefit and direct importance to your own fortunes.

It is not ridiculous to say that the health of the chief executive of a major multinational is a key macroeconomic risk for Ireland because it could genuinely affect us. Therefore we need to spread that risk out a little bit. We have a good chance, with the upcoming enterprise policy, to do precisely that.