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

Under socialism, we would want foreign direct investment. I welcome the jobs. I understand how important they are in many areas, including my own constituency, where a number of these multinationals are located. That does not mean they should not pay their fair share of tax. I will give an example from The Irish Timesthis year, "Google used 'double-Irish' [which was supposed to be gone in 2015, but lasted until 2020] to shift $75.4bn in profits out of Ireland". In 2019, it shifted them to a holding company, Google Ireland Holdings Unlimited Company, which is based in Bermuda, where there is a zero tax rate. It has no employees at all. That money was shifted out of here.

Due to some of us questioning those things, those companies have started to onshore the intellectual property rights to Ireland. That has given us a significant tax boon, although we still let them off on some of the taxes they should pay. This has happened because some of us started to question the sacred cow of these multinationals. When I was on the finance committee in 2013, Deputy Doherty and I proposed a motion asking for Google, Apple and Facebook to come in to the committee. The committee voted against them coming in and, in fact, turned off the cameras when we were discussing whether they should come in.

That is how scared we were of these companies and I do not think we should be. As Deputy Ring rightly pointed out, they are making a lot of profit out of an educated Irish workforce that speaks English within the EU and they will stay here because they are making so much money. It is reasonable, therefore, to ask them to pay their fair share in tax and that is all we ask. The world is asking them to do that and we should be part of the campaign to make them pay their fair share rather than resisting that just call.

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