Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

What the Taoiseach said today was similar to what Deputy Barry said. That is a rarity. The Taoiseach argued that we are not good at developing our own business. Deputy Barry said something similar for some Trotskyist reason I do not quite understand. He indicated that our capitalist system in this country is not working. I understood the Taoiseach when he said that Ireland as a country is naturally blessed in so many ways from the beauty of its land to its wonderful people but it must also be acknowledged that we have disadvantages when compared to some rival economies. The Taoiseach went on to say that we are peripheral and small with a large ocean behind us and that we have a small population and domestic markets. It is all true. He said we were not overly endowed with natural resources and that these characteristics have historically stunted deep industrial development. That is all true in some ways. We are not short of natural resources. I fear that behind all this is a fundamental lack of confidence that we have the ability to make the next step that we need to make, not only going from a closed economy to an open one which we did in the late 1950s and early 1960s which has benefited our country tremendously. We want these companies here. We want Apple in Cork. There are good people in those companies and we can and should work with them. We are also at a stage where we can start standing on our own two feet and having our own enterprise and being good at it without having to employ the sort of tax breaks that we gave to attract this foreign direct investment here in the first instance. It is not just Apple. The question is where they exclusive? They were not because the double Irish is probably similar. They were probably caught in the hook because there seems to be only one or two other companies. If there are other companies the Minister for Finance needs to tell us what other companies availed of this stateless tax provision from Revenue.

We need to start developing our own business and work with multinationals as part of a global change to the tax system. If we do not do that we are on the wrong side of history. There is a growing realisation that the form of globalisation that has existed for the last 20 or 30 years where multinationals got too easy a ride and did not pay their fair share has to come to an end. The issue for today relates to where we place ourselves in that. What we have from Fine Gael, Labour, Fianna Fáil and some other Deputies is a deeply retrograde, mistaken strategic decision about how we present our country and how we view this case. We can move on from this but we will not move on from it by aiming all our guns at Brussels or the rest of Europe and pretending we are as white as the driven snow.

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