Brendan Howlin (Wexford, Labour) | Oireachtas source

That is why we have led the charge on this through the BEPs process. Deputy Adams should talk to our ambassadors who have been involved in that process but that would not give him any credit or political capital. In Government, as I have said, the Labour Party insisted on Ireland's continuing support for, if not its vanguard lead on, the OECD process and in Opposition we will continue to do so.

The second part of our amendment recognises that the work we carried out in ending the double Irish is not complete. We have made progress and some of the loopholes that allowed the creation of stateless corporations have been closed. There is no doubt that this work fed into the increase in the tax take that we have already seen. We saw corporation tax receipts increase from €4.6 billion in 2014 to €6.9 billion in 2015.

It was because of closing those loopholes.

I accept it would be foolish to think that we have finished our work. The moral outrage that we have heard over the last week about companies who avoid paying any tax, despite generating huge profits, is completely justified. We cannot expect families or individuals to pay their fair share of tax if companies do not. The Labour Party amendment calls for the ending of all loopholes in the tax code that facilitate aggressive tax avoidance by profitable companies. I welcome the reaction of the Minister who has responded overnight to these concerns and announced significant changes to section 110 of the Taxes Consolidation Act and we will look at those changes in detail. My colleague no doubt will have something to say on those. The practices of vulture funds over the last couple of years are completely unacceptable. The dirty deals which have been done, for example in the Clerys case which cast workers adrift overnight, are not acceptable-----

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