Mr. Conor O'Neill:

Before dealing with the question on fossil fuels, I strongly endorse Mr. Murtagh's comments on wealth taxation. A number of us have been raising the question of economic justice and tax justice in Ireland for a number of years. That question of a national forum on more progressive and effective taxation of wealth would be a really big step to getting all of this in detail. It is not just coming from civil society. In terms of the data, there is a brilliant organisation, the EU Tax Observatory, which is EU-funded and is led by Gabriel Zucman, who is widely regarded as one of the leading experts in this field and has advanced the conversation in a big way. Specifically on wealth taxes, the EU Tax Observatory estimated that a co-ordinated wealth tax, just at EU level, could raise €200 billion every year. Again, that is the loss and damage contribution, with change.

The key word from our perspective in Christian Aid Ireland is “co-ordinated”. The kind of international tax negotiations that happen at the OECD and that happened at the UN two weeks ago is where the rubber meets the road, yet we still see states, including Ireland, retreat to this position of narrow self-interest. I understand why that is, and that it is extremely difficult to move away from that model, but if we try to do this just on a national basis, it is much less likely to be effective, particularly with wealth because capital is mobile, and especially so within the European Union. If the EU can matter, we have to co-ordinate in that respect.

We did a piece of work over the past number of years where we looked at the use of a specific tax structure, which we have called the single malt, by one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the country and in the world. It operates between Ireland and Malta, using the interplay and the design of the two tax codes in those two jurisdictions. The result of that structure is that the company pays an effective tax rate on billions of euro of pandemic super-profits not of 15%, that headline, lightning rod rate, not of 12.5%, but 4%. People often cast this as being a battle between Ireland and Malta for who gets the biggest slice of the pie, but a lot of that money is actually heading to a bank account of a massive pharmaceutical company, and that could be in the Cayman Islands or elsewhere. Deputy Murphy used the term “conduit”, which is a very good description of how it functions here.

If that model of aggressive competition and undermining other EU states is maintained, we are not going to get there, so the proposals that Mr. Murtagh mentioned in the Oxfam research are ones that we really endorse. The key thing is co-operation to make them effective.