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

Masks like the one I am wearing are sometimes associated with stick-up robberies. It is kind of appropriate that it is politicians who are now wearing the masks that are associated with such robberies. It might be even more appropriate for the chief executive officers of some of the largest and wealthiest corporations to be wearing them, given the scale of their theft of tax revenues that should accrue to society in general from the absolutely staggering profits those corporations make. Those profits, which they make from the people working for them and on which they pay negligible levels of tax, are obscene. If the Minister does not start from that point, he is just being plain dishonest. The court did not dispute in its ruling that Apple paid 0.005% tax on vast amounts of profits.

That is obscene. There are no two ways about it. It succeeded in paying that derisory level of tax on vast profits by working through companies incorporated in this jurisdiction. The fact that the General Court of the European Union concluded that the Commission could not prove that the Revenue authorities conferred selective advantage on Apple does not take from the fact that Apple achieved that aim of paying a derisory level of tax in Ireland. Does anybody seriously believe that Revenue and the Government did not know that was happening? Does anybody believe that for one second? Unless we accept that Revenue and the Governments of the day were complete idiots, and I do not think anybody believes they were, then they knew what was going on and the derisory levels of tax that were being paid. However, the Commission could not prove that it was an arrangement designed specifically for Apple, although that is what it believes.

I have always believed that it was not just Apple that benefitted from such arrangements, but also a select group of ICT companies and possibly some pharmaceutical companies. They are certainly not arrangements from which that the vast majority of domestic small or medium enterprise in this country benefitted. In that sense, a very select advantage is conferred on these enormously wealthy companies.

Of course, the trick in all this is centred around intellectual property. This is not a historic issue. I love the concept of intellectual property. Firms were and are allowed to allocate profits to a company that is tax resident nowhere but is the holder of the intellectual property or the idea. They can allocate any amount of profit they wish to the company that owns the intellectual property. That is what they do. Every year, a company can declare profits of €1 billion, but give €990 million in royalties to the company which is the owner of the intellectual property and which is tax resident nowhere, thereby writing down taxable profit to negligible levels. They effectively write their own tax bill and the State allows them to do it.

These practices are an insult to the workers of the companies. The Government often declares that it must defend the jobs of the workers in Cork. That should absolutely be done. However, the idea that all of the wealth is generated by a company that is tax resident nowhere but holds "the idea" is insulting to the workers who produce iPhones and, indeed, those who sell them in Europe and the rest of the world. Apparently, their labour activity is worth nothing and the profits all result from "the idea". The ideas and the CEOs are not what kept us going and kept everything moving during the pandemic. Rather, it was the workers who do the physical work, the essential workers and the front-line workers. The ideological notion that one can attribute all the value to "the idea" or the intellectual property is a very capitalist and neo-liberal one which we should reject. That is an aside.

The crucial point is that none of this is historical. After the events which gave rise to the case, corporate profits went from €83 billion in to €190 billion in 2018. That is a 228% increase in gross trading corporate profits. In 2018, there were €190 billion in profits. That is a massive increase. How much tax was paid on those profits? A total of €10.4 billion. That is not 12.5%. No matter how many times the Minister asserts that these companies are paying 11.6%, as he just did in his address, they are not doing so. If they were paying 12.5% or even 11.6%, they would be paying approximately €23 billion in tax. How are they getting away with it? They are writing down their taxable profit on the basis of royalties paid to the company that possesses the idea or the intellectual property. In that way, they siphon off the profits such that the taxable profits are derisory and the effective tax rate is reduced to a negligible level. These practices are still going on. After pressure domestically and internationally forced the Government to do away with the double Irish, which was the mechanism through which Apple avoided taxes in the period covered by the ruling, the Government opened new doors for these companies. It is still going on. It is shameful and it is robbing people not just in this country but across the world of revenues that are needed for health, education, housing and infrastructure.

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