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

The G8 is the embodiment of the gross economic and political inequalities in the world today. These eight countries have 16% of the world's population but 66% of its wealth. The decisions they make affect billions of people around the world who have no right to make an input into these conferences.

That being said, as a result of pressure from the public, people like President Obama and Prime Minister Cameron have raised the issue of tax compliance and the failure of multinational corporations across the globe to pay their fair share of taxes. I see it is on the agenda for the G8. I wonder whether the Taoiseach will use this opportunity to clearly show his determination and that of this State to demand that tax compliance is forced on multinationals so that, in this country and across the world, they begin to pay their fair share of the enormous amount of profits they generate back into the states, economies and societies from which they garner those profits.

I ask the Taoiseach to do that and to put to bed the reputation of this country as an offshore tax haven and as one of the countries that is most deeply implicated in the sort of tax avoidance activities that led, for example, the IMF to report at the beginning of this year that the global elite and multinationals now have $18 trillion of profits held offshore through tax avoidance – that is more than the entire US economy. Will the Taoiseach add our weight to that and put to bed our appallingly bad, but I would say justified, reputation for being a haven for multinationals to avoid paying their fair share of tax?

Rather than suggest that G8 leaders play a round of golf in the country, as the Taoiseach suggested, I ask him to perhaps instead invite the G8 leaders to walk in the State’s forests.

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