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

The cover-up about what is really happening with Ireland's corporate tax rate has to end. We need an open, honest, transparent and comprehensive debate about what is really happening with the corporate tax rate.

An eminent Trinity professor of finance has flatly and completely disagreed with the repeated assertions by the Government, the Minister for Finance and the Taoiseach that the 12.5% corporate tax rate is effective at that rate or anything even close to it. He has said it is a small fraction of that. People were rightly outraged by the CRC scandal and about the consultants in Irish Water but these are in the ha'penny place compared with what is at stake in this discussion. We are talking about billions of euro, potentially, of lost revenue to the State if the professor is even close to being correct. At the very least, whether one agrees or disagrees, it is not good enough to keep trotting out the standard line.

I am a member of the Joint Committee on Finance and the Public Service. Last year I tabled a motion in the committee asking that some of the biggest companies in the country - multinational corporations - who were at the centre of this worldwide controversy and were located and registered for business in this country should be brought before the committee to answer questions about how they are paying so little tax, or at least how they are being accused of paying so little tax as a result of them being resident or incorporated in this country. However, Fine Gael, the Labour Party and Fianna Fáil Deputies all banded together to prevent that discussion at the finance committee. That is a disgrace, given the billions of euro at stake. We discover that the 11.9% rate which the Taoiseach has quoted endlessly turns out to be, according to Professor Jim Stewart, a fictional firm with 60 employees which neither imports nor exports products. It is not a real firm and it is certainly not the firms that are at the centre of this controversy. It is a ceramics firm that does not import or export. In case any of the questions I have asked repeatedly about this should be confused or dismissed, I reiterate that we were never asking questions about ordinary small and medium enterprises. We know they pay the 12.5% rate and the commercial rates and all the rest of it. The issue is that a few hundred enormous corporations account for about 70% to 80% of all the pre-tax profits that are made in this country but are paying a fraction of those pre-tax profits in actual tax or, in the case of these companies registered here but not tax liable here, are paying nothing at all, which is another semantic, legal scam for them to avoid tax, and everyone knows it.

Will the Taoiseach discuss at the Economic Management Council the holding of a serious, honest and open debate where the main players, the different competing views, and some of the corporations at the centre of this controversy are quizzed, questioned and interrogated to discover whether this State is losing out on billions of euro in tax revenue when ordinary residents are being screwed to the wall with cuts, charges, pay cuts, unemployment and all the rest of it? Does the Taoiseach not have a responsibility, given the parlous state of our economy and the financial situation of many of our citizens, to look into this seriously and not just trot out the pat answers provided by the Department of Finance?

In the past year we have been told about a 2.2% rate. I showed a 6.3% rate by means of a parliamentary question. The Nevin Institute quotes a rate of 8%. The Taoiseach has just mentioned 10%. We have heard 11.9%, 12.3% and now the Taoiseach has referred to 14%, which is a new figure. The corporate tax being paid in this country is somewhere between 2.2% and 14%. Billions of euro are at stake in that difference. Even based on that, there has to be a serious investigation.

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