Dr. Eddie Casey:

Exactly. We started to see these surges from 2015 on. We have taken an approach where we take that level of receipts we were earning as a starting point. Rather than model it on the basis of what GDP is doing, which is the key driver for many of these models in other countries and in Ireland in the past before we saw these surges, we use things that are representative of the domestic economy. We use things that have a clear link to the domestic economy like what is happening on the ground with jobs, taxes being paid by the majority such as VAT, income tax and those type of real economic developments. Those measures are produced by the CSO so they are pretty clear measures. There are things like GNI*, which we talk a lot about as economists and things like domestic gross value added, GVA, and we link it to those. We say if this is representative of what is happening in the underlying economy, rather than the distortions being caused by activities related to how foreign multinationals operate and how they organise themselves, we think this is what the underlying tax base looks like from profits and corporate activity. Linking it to those measures that are more representative of the domestic real economy we see what taxes would look like if they grew in line with those based on historical relationships between these things. That is where we end up with our estimate of the underlying tax that would be raised from corporations. The difference is the excess.