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

On Committee Stage, I asked the Minister about the projections for corporate pre-tax gross profits. I just found the note in that regard. To be honest, it is unbelievable. Deputy Barry just estimated what it might be, but it is way in excess of that. This is newsworthy. I do not know if the Minister has put this information out there, but Janey Mac. The Minister is estimating that gross pre-tax corporate profits for 2022 were €348 billion. That is astonishing. To put that in perspective, the figure for 2020, which is the most recent available and to which Deputy Barry just referred, is €193 billion. There has been a jump in profits of more than €150 billion in two years. From 2012 to 2020, there was a jump from €74 billion to €193 billion. Those are the figures on which I was working in the context of our pre-budget submission. That is a 157% increase in profits in eight years. Now it has taken another jump. I have not done the percentage calculation, but it has jumped another €150 billion in two years. That is unbelievable.

We have seen a bonanza in corporate profitability like never before and that has accelerated at an extraordinary rate in the past two years. We should bear in mind that in those two years, ordinary working people were crushed by cost-of-living increases and lost between €4,000 and €6,000 in the value of their income in real terms.

This is because of corporations, including energy and pharmaceutical corporations, all the big IT companies and so on - we could go through the list - are jacking up prices to reach these simply dizzying levels of profitability.

Deputy Barry slightly understated the degree of tax relief these corporations are getting. In 2020, on €193 billion in pre-tax profits, €11 billion was paid in tax, which is a rate of 6.1%. It is not 8%, 10% or 12.5% but 6.1%. I have not worked out the percentage for the new figures the Minister has just given us but if he is projecting that he will get €21 billion in tax, and is estimating that on the basis of pre-tax profits of €348 billion, if these corporations paid 12.5%, never mind 15%, 20% or 25%, they would pay €40.8 billion in tax. We can more or less work it out; they are paying between 5% and 6% tax on their pre-tax profits. That is what they are actually paying. That is shocking and shameful. We could almost double corporate tax revenue if we just made them pay an effective minimum rate of 12.5%. In my opinion, the rate should go right up. These companies should at least pay the level of taxation the average worker is expected to pay on his or her income, but could we not even just make them pay the 12.5%? An extra €20 billion would then be available. When we consider what that could do for the housing crisis, the resourcing and staffing of our health service, public transport, higher education, wages for workers, all the impacts of the cost-of-living crisis, and the cost of housing it is, quite frankly, staggering.

This is never really talked about and, as Deputy Barry indicated, the Government's only argument against it is that if it raised the level of taxation, these companies would all run away. The Minister may have noticed they are starting to run away anyway when it comes to jobs, which has nothing to do with the tax measures taken by the Government and everything to do with international events that have nothing to do with our tax policy. It has to do with the fact that these corporations have disproportionate wealth that could be called profit driven and egotistical. I probably should not use some of the adjectives I could use to describe people like Elon Musk and so on but what happens when that much profit and control of the global economy is given to one individual, or wealthy multibillionaires, is that we eventually see the sort of jobs massacre we are seeing anyway. Surely, the thing to do is make these companies pay their taxes now, while the going is good, in order to give us the revenues we need to invest in housing, health and key infrastructure rather than continuing to give them massive tax breaks, deductions, reliefs, tax credits and so on, where they pay a fraction of the tax ordinary workers pay.

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