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

During the committee hearings that year, it was said that the much trumpeted double Irish would, in fact, be replaced by another scheme through which the same companies would be able to avoid pretty much the same amount of taxes, but in a slightly different way, by speaking about patents and intellectual property rights. That is exactly what happened. The Government was warned about it. The Minister acts as though he is some sort of innocent and Apple got the better of him, but the change that the then Minister, Deputy Noonan, made in that budget resulted in them avoiding billions of tax, just as I said it would at the committee meeting. The mechanism through which they did this has now been revealed in the Paradise Papers. The former Taoiseach, Deputy Enda Kenny, met the CEO of Apple earlier that year, as did the Minister, Deputy Richard Bruton, and in the 2015 budget which was presented in October 2014, the change was included which opened the window for this tax avoidance scheme. Is the Minister seriously suggesting that he did not know this would be the result, and that conveniently Apple would be allowed to onshore billions of euro of assets and, as Séamus Coffey pointed out, not pay any extra tax at all even though the profits in that year jumped by approximately €50 billion?

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