Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy. I believe taxes should be low, simple and fair. That goes for workers and companies. I am not sure if the Deputy believes taxes should be low, simple and fair. Perhaps simple and fair but not low. I believe that should apply to companies and workers alike. I hope that when it comes to budget day the Deputy will vote in favour of tax indexation, for example, where we raise the credits and bands so that people are protected from the effect of inflation on their pay packets.

Our position is one of defending our national interest. Some 250,000 people work in multinational companies in Ireland and that spins off another 100,000 jobs or so. That is 350,000 jobs. We want to retain those jobs in Ireland and we want more of them all over the country. We also want to protect our revenue base. We take in between €10 billion and €12 billion a year in corporation profit tax, double what the average European country does on a per head basis, precisely because we have a low tax rate. In the modern world that we live in, labour, capital, investment and money - all those things - are internationally mobile. If taxes are too high, the companies leave. If taxes are low, they come in. That is why the 12.5% rate has worked so well for Ireland and that it what this is about for us - trying to protect jobs and our revenue stream. The €10 billion or €12 billion we take in every year from corporations is roughly the cost of running our entire education system. It is that large an amount of money and we want to retain that coming in.

I know this can be characterised in a very simple way as corporations not paying their fair share of tax. They should pay their fair share of tax, whether it is here or somewhere else, but, in reality, these negotiations have been about other things. They have been about larger countries trying to get a bigger share of the pie and taking that share of the pie from us. It has not been about ensuring that countries in the developing world get a fairer share of the taxation; it has been about big and wealthy countries that think we are getting too much and want to take some of that off us. That is what we have to protect and push back against.

See this speech in context