Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

It is not necessarily the timing of taxation. These companies are highly mobile. Companies could defer their liabilities for ten years and there is no guarantee that they will be here in ten years or that the structure of the companies would mean that the taxation would be available then. They could move their profit centre to some other jurisdiction. Let us not pretend that is not a risk. The reality is that this is a policy choice. The Minister's officials told us that. There is no other reason for this. I am asking the Minister to apply the same tax rules to intellectual property brought onshore by a company last month as we should be applying to intellectual property that was brought on to this shore post 2015.

I refer to what the Minister is allowing companies to avail of in the tax code because of this flawed decision, for whatever reason or at whoever's bidding it was made. We know Apple is one of these multinational companies. This has been written about internationally and has brought shame to Ireland in respect of our tax code. Intellectual property has been brought to Ireland and it has been possible to write down effective tax very close to zero as a result of this. The Minister is saying that he is going to apply a different tax code to that intellectual property and a separate tax policy in respect of intellectual property that was here in the past year or may come in future years.

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