Paul Murphy (Dublin South West, Solidarity) | Oireachtas source

I am not sure whether the Minister has heard of the term "the finance curse", which comes after "the resource curse", which describes the apparent paradox of countries with valuable natural resources. Rather than thriving they crumbled and often had something significantly less than democracy, which became known as "the paradox of plenty". The finance curse was coined by Nick Shackson who wrote Treasure Islands, a book about tax havens where Ireland features quite prominently. It is described in an article in The Atlantic:

When the "finance curse" strikes a country, there is a recurrent pattern: While its democracy, economy, and culture remain formally intact, they are increasingly oriented to and co-opted by international elites. In other words, such countries gradually become organized around the interests of people who don't even live there, to the detriment of those who do. The services produced by these countries protect cosmopolitans’ wealth, but the riches never flow to the local producers, undermining their capacity for self-governance and social cohesion, as well as the development of infrastructure and institutions.

That is a pretty good description of what is happening in this country and it is a pretty good description of the kind of policy capture that has gone on in terms of enshrining the interests of those corporations. When one looks at companies such as Apple, the companies themselves that are avoiding the tax did not employ anybody in terms of what we thought was going on. There is a separation between the actual value-producing activity and the tax avoidance that is going on with the elevation of those corporations on an absolute pedestal.

Yet, we elevate these corporations on a pedestal. The scale of the money we are talking about is immense, and includes the €13 billion from Apple. If we doubled corporation tax revenue in this country, we would raise in excess of €6 billion. That would transform people's lives. It is a choice of the Irish Government to hold to our current industrial policy. It has chosen to continue being a corporate tax haven. That is a choice that goes absolutely nowhere because the clock is ticking on it.

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