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

I to support this amendment. It could be called the let-us-tax-the-leprechaun amendment given this window was opened after the double Irish arrangement was closed down because of political pressure. This window was the mechanism through which the companies that had availed of the arrangement then moved into a new tax avoidance mechanism which seemed to be designed for them. It is a scandal.

The consequence of that was a massive onshoring of intangible assets that spiked Irish economic growth rates to the levels where we became the laughing stock of the entire world and gained the name leprechaun economics. It is not glib to say the leprechaun should be taxed because we are talking about hundreds of millions of euros from these companies which are making staggering profits and even granting an 80% relief on these intangibles is extraordinarily generous to these companies. The intangibility of assets is precisely the means through which these large multinational corporations can essentially put whatever price they like on their intellectual property and move it from one arm of their company to another, with one arm charging for the use of that asset, or paying for that asset or the royalties on the use of that asset, and, through that mechanism, they can essentially write their own tax bill. To give those companies 100% relief was extraordinary and inexplicable.

I believe it was explained by several high level meetings that took place that year between Ministers and executives of a certain company, called Apple, after it was obvious that the double Irish had to close down and there were moves which were going to lead to it being closed down. I cannot explain it any other way and particularly when we then discovered afterwards that officials were saying this should not be done, but it was done anyway.

The minimum we could ask is for a report on why we should not do this. It is not just the left saying that. The fact that Mr. Seamus Coffey recommended this suggests that it is not an ideological demand. It is a reasonable demand to close a window that should not have been opened to allow extraordinarily profitable companies avoid vast amounts of tax. At the end of the day, we lose out. Those revenues would make a substantial difference in housing or health. We also lost out, and are losing out, because we have to pay larger contributions to the European Union because of artificially inflated growth rates. I do not have the figures in front of me, but I think we are talking about a couple of hundred million euros worth of additional contributions to the EU based on the size of our GDP, which is inflated because of the tax avoidance mechanisms being used by these companies.

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