Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Socialist Party) | Oireachtas source

On the specifics of the Bill, in general I could be in agreement with the idea of facilitating generic medicine. It is marginal and whether it will make any real difference in the real world remains to be seen but the basic idea of facilitating experimentation and so on without danger of being sued by generic medicine corporations makes sense. There is a question over who owns the companies that produce generic medicines. Obviously, those of us on the left are in favour of generic medicines. We are in favour of people having access to medicines but they also, in turn, are run by corporations for profits and also can exploit the needs of people. This obviously points to the need for public ownership and democratic control of those generic corporations themselves.

However, this brings up a broader point about intellectual property and about what kind of patent regime one should have because intellectual property is now widely referred to as the oil of the 21st century and the direction of travel of legislation on intellectual property right across Europe and globally is clear. It is heading towards much more rigorous and strict interpretation, as well as actual legislation, regarding intellectual property whereby such property is now being more protected than was the case previously. It is being incorporated into all the free trade deals being done and intellectual property is now the key issue. The working assumption on which this is all being done - or at least the pretext - is that to have innovation in pharmaceuticals, technology, culture or anything, one must have, as Deputy Boyd Barrett mentioned, the private ownership of ideas. The premise is this is what will incentivise investment in research and development by the likes of the pharmaceutical corporations and without it, one will not have the development of science or technology. This has been summed up by the chief executive officer of GlaxoSmithKline, Andrew Witty, who stated:

The pharmaceutical industry is hugely innovative... If governments work to support, not stifle, innovation, the industry will deliver the next era of revolutionary medicine.

Therefore, and again like the ideology supported by the majority of Members, the role of the Government and the State is simply to create the environment whereby these entrepreneurial individuals and companies will invest and therefore develop new medicines for humankind.

The reality is already very different, even with the private ownership and private domination of the pharmaceutical industry. A study published in the New England Journal of Medicineby Dr. Marcia Angell concluded that more than two thirds, almost 80%, of the new molecular entities, that is, new drugs as opposed to slight variations on old drugs, which is mostly what the private corporations do, come from investment by the state. In the United States and the United Kingdom, through Government and university investment, the majority of real research, which results in real steps forward in respect of pharmaceuticals or technology comes from the state, as opposed to from private corporations. One should take the example of the Internet itself, which obviously arose from a Government-funded research in the United States. There is a large element of private corporations taking taxpayer-funded research, altering it slightly, slapping a patent on it and then having ownership over that and preventing the further development of science or medicine. In recent years, there has been an absolute explosion in the number of patents given in the pharmaceutical industry and in many industries. An important element of this pertains to tax avoidance, about which I will make a point in a moment. Arguably, the increase in the number of patents is not an illustration of an increase in the number of new medicines or new technologies being discovered but actually operates to work in the reverse. For example, researchers have argued that many of the recent trends in patents, such as an increase in upstream patents, which includes, for example, the patenting of research tools, have caused the rate of innovation to fall rather than increase, as it blocks the ability of science to move forward in an open exploratory way. Research tools are being patented by the likes of GlaxoSmithKline and the other major pharmaceutical corporations, which restricts the ability of researchers in lesser developed countries to catch up with what has already been developed and this actually hampers development.

The most basic point I will make is that the private ownership and control of ideas that are essential for all of humankind, as opposed to just the corporations or the rich who can afford the private medicines, works to the detriment of society at large. It works to the detriment of the further development of those ideas and of everybody who needs access to those medicines. From the perspective of the Anti-Austerity Alliance, this points to the need for information essentially to be free and for research to be funded by the State, as happens at present. A large amount of research is funded by the State but then is taken and privatised and the further development of ideas then is hampered. Instead, information should be free and it should be funded on a massive scale by the State. In that way, extremely significant steps forward could be taken because, precisely as Deputy Boyd Barrett noted, new ideas are built on old ideas. One takes bits of this and that, puts them together and develops them. The same is true for the pharmaceutical industry as it is in respect of culture.

The other main point I will make is on the reality of how patents are used. If one examines all the patents held in Ireland, one will find patents from corporations one would not really expect to have them such as, for example, patents from corporations like Starbucks. Such corporations, as well as those from the pharmaceutical industry, use patents in part as a means of tax avoidance. They register their patent here and by being headquartered here in Ireland they get away with paying extremely low rates of tax. There are scandalous examples of this such as the case of Gilead Sciences, which developed a new hepatitis C drug that sells for $84,000 for a course of treatment that primarily is sold to the US market. However, as it is headquartered here, it manages to pay very little tax as a result. This largely is what the patents are used for. If one examines all the current patents given, very few of them are then cited by anybody else by other corporations, thereby illustrating they do not really have any intrinsic scientific value but are a means of stating they are there and this is a means of avoiding large amounts of tax.

While this has not been incorporated in this Bill but will come later, it appears that the Government strategy to deal with criticisms of the double Irish is to go further in the direction of allowing patents to facilitate payments of tax rates that are significantly below the headline rates of tax. As there has been a huge amount of criticism in respect of the double Irish, it has been decided to phase it out over an extremely long period and to replace it with what is being described here as a knowledge box but which in Britain is called a patent box. The latter absolutely appears to be the inspiration for our knowledge box but perhaps we will have half the rate here that they levy in Britain. The Institute for Fiscal Studies in Britain, which is not a radical left organisation, has strongly criticised the patent box model. It states that "to the extent that a Patent Box reduces the tax rate for activity that would have occurred in the absence of government intervention, the policy includes a large deadweight cost" because much of this innovation simply would have happened without the need for allowing these corporations to pay little or no tax. Consequently, this is another significant subsidy by the taxpayer to private industry by facilitating it to pay extremely low amounts of tax. If the actual purpose is to develop a pharmaceutical industry here that is sustainable and can create good quality jobs and conditions for those that work therein, as well as to develop medicines, then it is more straightforward and makes more sense economically and socially to have investment by the State itself, instead of giving this massive subsidy to private industry.

In that way we could have a publicly owned, democratically controlled pharmaceutical industry. We could undertake major research, which could be connected to the universities etc., to develop the type of medicines that can be used and that could be a boom economically also.

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