Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for further clarifying his position, and that is what I understood it to be.

9 o’clock

My preference would have been that the State would have signalled our intention to fully sign up and explicitly support pillar 2 for a range of different reasons. I fear, because of the continued delay in us committing to signing up to pillar 2 - I appreciate the unknowns that the Minister is reflecting on - that will mean that we are coming at this from a position of relative weakness rather than relative strength.

I understand the point the Minister makes regarding a rate of at least 15%. It has been damaging in the sense that we have wasted some opportunities over the last period of time to build alliances to ensure that we may only go to 15% rather than a rate that may be above 15% that might cause the Minister and the Government some difficulty. That is the concern that I have.

What this over-reliance on a very small number of multinational corporations to fund our services reveals is a disproportionate focus on investment of multinational corporations when, in fact, we should be probably focusing more on a new industrial strategy that would allow us to support indigenous Irish enterprise to innovate and go global from Ireland.

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