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

Diarmaid Ferriter put it well in The Irish Timeswhen he said that if the Department of Finance were to be believed, there must be an awful lot of eejits slaving away on academic research projects relating to tax. The approach of the Department and the Government is simply to deny report after report based on facts which illustrate Ireland's role as a corporate tax haven. Let us deal with the central proposition of the paper, which is the point about the ratio of profits to wages. The report found that US companies in Ireland declared $8 of profit for every $1 spent on wages here. That is 16 times the average rate among non-tax havens and 16 times the average among Irish companies in Ireland. To put it simply, what explains the extraordinarily high levels of productivity of workers in the multinational sector in Ireland compared with workers in the indigenous sector? Is it not the case that the only explanation for this relates to the shifting of intangible assets, etc., and the use of Ireland as a conduit tax haven?

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