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

On the face of it, the introduction of this Bill seems to be a reasonably positive move. As I understand it, we are making it easier for companies to develop generic medicines without running foul of patent laws or infringing intellectual property rights. I can certainly see the value of that. The bigger context for much of this debate is the scandalous manner in which big pharmaceutical companies have used patent restrictions on life-saving drugs, such as AIDS anti-viral drugs, to prevent countries in the developing world from producing cheap generic versions of those drugs. Huge struggles and campaigns have been organised by people who are justifiably furious and angry because pharmaceutical companies are prioritising their profits, and their perceived right to control the intellectual property rights to particular drugs, rather than the lives of humans who desperately need live-saving drugs. In so far as this Bill seems to be part of a move to hasten and facilitate the development of generic and cheaper versions of drugs, it is a good thing. I can also see the advantages of this legislation from a domestic economic point of view. Many patented branded drugs can be produced more cheaply, and consequently delivered more cheaply to the people who need them, as generic products with the same biological ingredients but without the branding and the patent costs, etc. Such positive aspects of the Bill should be broadly welcomed.

A few questions that arise with regard to the whole area of intellectual property are worth discussing in this context. Why do the cost savings to the public health service that were supposed to derive from the expansion of the development of generic drugs not seem to have delivered the big dividend that this Government was talking about a few years ago? The reduction in the cost to the health service does not seem to have transpired in real terms. I would be interested to hear what the Minister of State and the Government have to say in that regard. I wonder whether some of the big pharmaceutical companies lobbied the Government to try to prevent it from accessing cheaper versions of drugs that would reduce the cost to the public health service. This, in turn, might have prevented the delivery of the big savings that were talked about at length a couple of years ago.

All discussion of them has disappeared, however, given the major crises of funding, safety and so on in the health service. What has happened to the large savings we were hoping to deliver?

Broadly speaking, this Bill is moving in a progressive direction by loosening the patent restrictions and allowing the production of certain drugs. However, it raises a wider question about intellectual property. We must start considering this important issue because the assigning of value to intellectual property is one of the key mechanisms through which large multinational corporations avoid tax. In this context, we must consider definitions and the question of how we assign value to intellectual property and allocate profits from same. The idea is seemingly being abused by large corporations to avoid paying a fair share of tax on their profits, which was the issue at the centre of the famous double Irish tax scam that the Government claims it is moving to close by demanding that the companies incorporated in Ireland now be tax liable here. I am sure the Minister of State knows that, under the double Irish, companies making large profits in Ireland would transfer those under the guise of intellectual properties to which they assigned a significant value to companies that were tax resident in Bermuda or another tax haven, thereby avoid paying tax on them.

According to the Government, we are phasing out the double Irish, but we will move towards a patent box. Many commentators other than me have asked whether we are just replacing one tax scam with another in order to facilitate large multinationals' aggressive tax avoidance by ascribing significant values to intellectual properties, thereby hiding profits. I believe much of the commentary that suggests this is the case. In response to the closing off of the double Irish, for example, the Debt and Development Coalition Ireland stated: "The Government is playing musical chairs on corporate tax. While it is welcome that the 'Double Irish' scheme will be closed, the phased approach to its closure provides corporations with 6 years to avail of new tax dodging mechanisms". We will have the patent box at the end of those six years, the practice of which in Britain, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and so on has been criticised as another mechanism to allow companies to hide profits. As such, it seems that a Bill like this one is a missed opportunity to have a serious discussion about definitions of "intellectual property" and what value can fairly be assigned to it.

It is tempting to become somewhat philosophical about what constitutes intellectual property. Despite being a student of English literature, I was unaware that one of the first people to come up with the idea of copyright, which later developed into patents and so on, was the poet William Wordsworth. It was a revolution or, rather, a counter-revolution in how ideas and intellectual property were handled. Sometimes we assume that we have always had laws that allow us to privatise and commodify intellectual property, ideas and so forth. Prior to Wordsworth and the beginning of the 19th century, though, there was no such notion. In fact, there was the opposite, a recognition that ideas were no one's property. Shakespeare would have laughed at the idea of intellectual property. His plays were a patchwork of patent infringements, as it were. He would have been sued to high heaven under the current patent laws for cogging material from the ancient Greeks and Romans, earlier writers in medieval-----

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