Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance)

I think the Minister knows the point of my question, which is the extent to which the people of this country will benefit from gas and oil production under the terms that currently operate. It is not very clear to me what €190 million represents as a proportion because the Minister has not really answered that question. If I am correct in understanding what the Minister said, €190 million is the total tax take from the three fields I have asked about. I ask the Minister to clarify this for me. What I want to find out is how much tax revenue has been received from those fields as a proportion of the overall income generated so that we can know the actual percentage rather than the figures of between 25% and 40% being bandied around as to what we might receive. It is like the corporation tax rate which we are told is 12.5% but actually the effective tax rate is 10%. How much are we actually getting back? I doubt very much we will get 40% back, given the other methods for the tax write-offs on capital costs and so on which means, I suspect, that in many cases we will get virtually nothing back from some of these fields, no royalties and no security of supply. We cannot even control prices because we have effectively given away these gas and oil reserves under the conditions of the licences. How can we justify a situation where at best we are talking about 40% while in Iran, for example, there are service-sharing agreements by which the state maintains the ownership of the gas and in Norway the state receives a 78% tax rate and it owns 67% of the gas and oil? Why are we giving away the gas and oil and what will we be getting back in return? Some of us suspect it will be nothing.

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