Joe Higgins (Dublin West, Socialist Party)

RTE's "This Week" programme recently highlighted a scandalous aspect of corporation tax policy in this State. The Government enables transnational corporations to use this country as a blatant Cayman Islands-like tax scam essentially to take billions of euro in profits made in many countries around the world, launder them through the Irish Republic to avail of one of the lowest corporation tax rates in the world and avoid paying hundreds of millions, or probably billions, in tax in countries where the money was actually earned, including in the Middle East and Africa. In 2005, one company, SanDisk, notified €106 million profit in this State with eight employees.

When the Ansbacher gang was channelling its money offshore, there was loud condemnation here, and rightly so, over its tax evasion and avoidance while care for the old, sick and handicapped was crucified for lack of resources. The Taoiseach's corporation tax policy is depriving hundreds of millions of people, including people in very poor countries, of substantial tax revenues which their health and education services desperately need. He is also facilitating massive tax avoidance by Irish multimillionaire tax exiles, although these patriots make the sacrifice of abandoning their far flung luxury mansions to tug the Taoiseach's sleeve every summer in Galway — no doubt to ensure he will continue to allow them to skim on taxes.

This morning Allied Irish Banks and Cement Roadstone Holdings announced that they raked in €3.78 billion in profits last year paying a relative pittance in tax in this State. Incredibly, we hear Irish semi-State companies are using ghost companies in Amsterdam to avoid paying taxes.

The Taoiseach has created a tax paradise for big business and the super rich but he will not pay the nurses their due. We have the second highest pupil-teacher ratio in primary schools in the European Union. We have desperate parents who cannot access services for children with special needs allegedly for lack of resources.

From his answers to the previous two questions, I note the Taoiseach is in script mode big time. I ask him to leave aside the script and say if there is any other way to describe the corporation tax policy of his Government except to say that it is utterly immoral.

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