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

We debated quite a bit of this on Committee Stage so I will not delay excessively. I will reiterate briefly the reasons we have tabled a series of amendments to this Bill and more generally why we will, at the end of this process, be opposing this Bill and calling for a vote on it. I indicated this on Second and Committee Stages.

This Bill, which will probably go largely unnoticed by the public and media, proposes to provide another tax loophole for the corporate sector such that if one qualifies for the knowledge development box tax break, one will pay tax at a rate of 6.25% rather than 12.5%. I find this extraordinary although it is quite consistent with the general approach of both this Government and Fianna Fáil. Their policy, on which they are united, is to reduce an already extraordinarily low tax burden on corporations' profits even further. This is at a time when we have had the scandal of Apple. There is €19 billion, including interest, that we do not want to collect. This could transform the lives of all those suffering and struggling in the face of the housing and health crises. The revenue would provide the money we need to resolve the dispute in Bus Éireann and so much more. We could literally transform the country just by collecting the taxes from one company, Apple, which according to European Commission dodged tax to the tune of €13 billion. The Apple tax scam was just the tip of a very big iceberg, however.

I addressed this matter in the debate on Second and Committee Stages. It needs to be shouted from the rooftops as often as possible. With the exception of only one of seven years after the crash in 2008, during which years the whole country expected the corporations to be crushed with austerity, the profits of the corporations went up consistently. There was a slight dip in 2008. Therefore, while everybody else was getting poorer, the corporations were making profits and getting richer. Not only that, when the financial emergency caused by the gambling and speculation of the corporate and financial elite was resulting in the imposition of the most cruel and vicious austerity on working people in this country, at which time the Government believed it was justifiable to bring in financial emergency measures Acts and lash up taxes on workers and slash housing budgets, everybody bar one group got hit cruelly hard time and again. One group did not get hit at all.

There was not even an emergency levy or a little bit of extra emergency tax on the corporate sector which was paying pitifully low levels of tax. The 12.5% rate, which is lower than what any average worker would pay on his or her income, is not good enough. Actually, due to a whole rake of loopholes, these corporations were paying on average, interestingly, 6.25%. The Government wants to legitimise this with this knowledge development box proposal to get around moves on an international scale to close down some of those loopholes. It is the new double Irish.

I oppose this fundamentally. This set of amendments at least attempts to oblige the Government to give us detailed information as to who is benefitting from this tax break, in what sectors and in what areas, as well as other information that would allow the public to at least know who is benefitting from this tax scam.

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