John Lahart (Dublin South West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Boyd Barrett will be happy to hear I yearn for a world where every enterprise was a social enterprise but we would not get very far with that. I mean that sincerely. I have been fortunate, since I became a Deputy, to be a voluntary board director of a social enterprise and it has educated me greatly on the not-for-profit model. However, we live in a world where private enterprise is front and centre. I would like to see more social enterprise. It is a model that is certainly much more promoted in other countries in the European Union and in much more substantial economies than ours, such as Germany, where it is understood. Under the Covid supports there, social enterprise received significant funding.

Someone needs to have a counterbalancing perspective to the one offered by Deputy Boyd Barrett. We sit on the Committee on Budgetary Oversight and we have been listening to the Irish Fiscal Advisory Council, IFAC, advise us year after year that companies pay so much corporation tax that we are over-reliant on them and there needs to be a shift in our emphasis where raising revenue through tax is concerned. I am thinking of some of the companies that are expanding and are resident in this country. The one that really comes to mind as a beacon at the moment is Pfizer. It is an incredible private enterprise. What a facility to have here. It has a number of facilities. They are very welcome here. I look at the construction jobs provided in the lead-up to the establishment of many of these corporations. I look at the very well-paid jobs and educated workforces they employ, so that people going through our university systems find good and gainful employment and pay lots of tax on the good salaries they earn. I think not just of all the jobs that corporation tax has provided over the last ten to 15 years, but also of all the social protection it has paid, all the hospital beds it has provided and all the universities it has helped to enhance and build. I think of all the development and progression it has enabled this country to make since we began to look outward in this direction and began to attract, to use the cliché, foreign direct investment into this place, which was a backwater until foreign investment took an interest in us. It is not perfect but having been a local authority member, I have made the point at many budgetary oversight meetings that it is not just corporation tax they pay. I am being very rough in my estimate of this but I remember from my time on South Dublin County Council that 90% of the commercial rate was paid, and probably still is, by about 15 companies. Most of them are probably corporations that are housed and accommodated in South Dublin County Council and do business there. I just wanted to give an alternative perspective on that.

I share some concerns about how some of the profits have become obscene during the period of Covid. It would be a better world if we could have a more socially directed private enterprise system but we need to consider the advances that have been made. A year and a half ago we thought we would be getting the vaccine this month whereas we are actually on the third part of the vaccination programme because private enterprise had the resources, expertise, research capacity and production facilities to ramp up and supply certainly the western world to date and enable us to go and live our lives in the meaningful way we want to.

I look forward to the Minister's answer on this. It is an issue that is raised continuously but the public also needs to know the value for money this country has derived from being an attractive place to invest in. That side of the argument needs to be put forward in this debate as well. That is not to say I am in love with the vast profits, because I am not. Corporations need to pay their fair share but in the balance of things, the part played by foreign direct investment in Ireland has been inarguable. Maybe we should hear Deputy Boyd Barrett occasionally say that foreign direct investment and these corporations have been very good for this country and its people.

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