Mr. Matthew McGann:

Underlying the Deputy's question is about what is driving the increase in corporation tax receipts. What we see in general is that it is correlated with the increase in operating surplus, essentially profits, in the multinational sector in Ireland. As we are all aware, our corporation tax receipts - and this is a big part of the risk attached to them - are extremely concentrated with more than half of them coming from ten firms. The Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, recently estimated that maybe a third of it is from just three firms. I do not want to sound crass in how I am saying this but the sectoral composition of those firms meant they had, for the want of a better phrase, a good pandemic in terms of pharmaceutical, ICT etc. The profits associated with those firms were Covid-19-proof. Again, I do not want to sound dismissive of the pandemic but we saw very large increases in the operating surpluses of those sectors.