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

I will leave the more philosophical debate to the next group amendments.

The bottom line is that this is a tax loophole, exploiting the rather vague notion of intellectual property, which was at the centre of the double Irish tax scam. This is another tax loophole revolving around the concept of intellectual property, whatever that is.

That is why I say it is the double Irish mark two. It is the new official double Irish, sanctioned by the State and even by the OECD. The reason we want information is that I suspect the people who will benefit from this will be a select few, just as the corporations which benefited from the double Irish will be the select few. It will not be the corner shop or a small and medium enterprise, it will be a select few corporations which know how to exploit the tax code and the concept of intellectual property in order to reduce their tax liability as Apple, Goggle, Facebook and the lot of them have done. That is what this is about. The Minister of State, in these set of amendments, is resisting this under the vague argument about commercial secrecy or anonymity but why does the Government really want to resist this? It does not want us to have detailed information which would confirm that it is the select few industries and businesses that will benefit from it, and that will blow the lie that the ordinary small and medium enterprise will benefit from it. It will not be the corner shop or the small guy in the local town who has come up with an enterprising idea who will benefit from it, it will be the corporate sector. The figure of €7.5 million and the figure of €50 million globally in this context constitutes the definition of a small and medium enterprise, but those figures are not small, they are big.

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