Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome young Reese Ward, a primary school pupil from Letterkenny who is here interested in this debate because this is about all of our futures. I am sure that if Reese was looking at a parliament anywhere else in the world, he would be waiting a long time for a finance minister to get to his feet and tell the parliament that he is disappointed that the state is to receive €14.1 billion and that he is disappointed that the state is to get what it is legally entitled to.

The Minister says he is disappointed about taxes that were supposed to be paid to us when his party was cutting the blind pension and the minimum wage and when it was closing hospital beds and home supports are being paid to us now. That shows where Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael are on this issue and have been all the way through. I have never seen them bat as hard as they are doing for this one company for those who need scoliosis treatment or people in my constituency who need mental health treatment or the people who languish in hospital beds or, indeed, the children who are without homes. However, when it comes to individual companies that record billions of euro in profits, the Government is happy to squander taxpayers' money fighting the European Commission right to the very end. Even when the most senior court in Europe has said that the Government provided selective tax agreements, it rejects this. That is what the Minister said in his conclusion. He said he rejects the findings of the court. He is accepting them but he rejects the findings. The Government still has its head in the sand and is saying that this did not happen.

What is this all about? It is about two subsidiaries of Apple that were incorporated companies in Ireland. They had no premises. They had no building here whatever. They had no staff. The company only existed on paper but it was incorporated here. It recorded €104 billion profit over a ten-year period. The Minister’s argument, and that of the Minister for Finance, Deputy Paschal Donohoe, and the Labour Party at the time, was that they did not need to be taxed here, and, indeed, that they did not need to be taxed anywhere in the world. That is what is at the core of this issue. These were two companies that were incorporated in Ireland with no employees and no physical presence. Somehow we are saying that we can book profits from Apple sales of €104 billion that were not taxed anywhere in the world. It was only when I published legislation to end stateless companies that the Minister at the time, Michael Noonan, acceded and closed that loophole.

The fact the Government has wasted €10 million in taxpayers' money fighting this case to the bitter end shows where its priorities lie. It has stood over this issue of a special arrangement that no other company has enjoyed. No company in my constituency had this arrangement. All the butchers, small factories and SMEs had to pay their 12.5% tax rate throughout this period. All the multinationals in Dublin, Cork and elsewhere had to pay their 12.5%. This was a selective advantage to one company and that is what the European Court of Justice has said. It was a sweetheart deal that violated state aid rules but despite the clear rights and wrongs of this case, Minister after Minister, including Minister for Finance after Minister for Finance, refused to accept these basic facts. The Minister, Deputy Chambers, has refused to accept the findings of the European court today in any sincere way. That speaks volumes. However, it is not only finance Ministers who tried to deny taxpayers the €14.1 billion that we are lawfully entitled to. Some 56 TDs in this Dáil voted one after the other to reject this money and to appeal this to try to make sure that taxpayers never got this money. That is a price tag of €250,000 on every single vote. That is €14 billion that was rightfully owed to the Irish State and that is rightfully being collected by the Irish State now but the Government did everything in its power not to get it. Let us remember that the Commission had to take the then Government to the ECJ in the middle of this because it refused to collect the money from Apple during the 2016 to 2017 period and up to 2018.

In the middle of all of this, austerity was let loose. The blind pension was on the chopping block. People with disabilities were on the chopping block. The minimum wage was on the chopping block. However, when it came to wasting taxpayers money for this company that recorded €104 billion profit, and the Government argued that it did not need to pay tax anywhere, it was protected over and over again. Now, the Minister, with a brass neck, tells the Dáil that he is going to decide some backroom deal with his Government partners how they will spend the money that they never wanted in the first place. Let me tell him this: it will be the Irish people who will decide where this money needs to be spent. It will be the Irish people in the next election that will decide the priorities in this regard. I remember the heckles and hackles of the Members opposite during this period. I remember Deputy English speaking in the Dáil about the politics of populism and protest from the fringes of the Opposition. He said we already pocketed the €13 billion to cure all the social issues. He said: "The politics of populism is spreading false hope." That is the core of it. The politics of those in power is to undermine hope and to act as though our social issues cannot be solved because hope was exactly what this money represented to the people. These were people who had been through years of austerity so Fine Gael went out, along with Fianna Fáil, to go after hope and chip away at it. They said there was no sweetheart deal. They told us the Commission was mistaken. They said that if we did not take the money, other countries would take it from us. They pretended that this was an issue of tax sovereignty and they have now been proved categorically wrong. The highest court in the European Union has made a clear and decisive ruling that this was a sweetheart deal for a single company that violated the principles of equal treatment that underpin the Single Market and that the money should go to Ireland. Despite the misleading statements from Government TDs and others in the media, it was always the case that the vast majority of this money was coming to this State.

I want to do away with some of the more recent spin that this verdict was bad for Ireland. The Minister himself made that point. He said he was disappointed about this. This is a good verdict for Ireland. This is money that we should invest in ending the housing crisis that the Government is creating. This is money that we should invest in building capacity in our hospitals to stop the trauma being inflicted on citizens over and over again. This is a good day for Ireland. The reputational damage to Ireland was done when this decision was made and when Apple itself told the world under sworn testimony that it had a special deal with Ireland that its corporation tax rate would be no more than 2%. The damage was done in 2016 when the European Commission found us guilty and the damage was done every year after that when Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil cobbled together to fight this and denied the obvious truth over and over again instead of admitting any wrongdoing and dealing with the indefensible. However, they were not alone. It was not only Fine Gael or Fianna Fáil. Labour rode the coat tails of that Government to ensure that did not happen. Indeed, when, after the American hearings which heard from the CEO and the chief financial officer of Apple, I said the finance committee should invite them in to discuss the issue, Labour, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael and the Independents shut it down. They would not even allow us to breathe the word "Apple" in the context of asking the questions that needed to be asked. We have been proved right all this time.

This is a good day for Ireland. It is a bad day for the Government. It is a bad day for the type of approach it took where it put ordinary citizens at the mercy of its efforts to try to protect one single company. In this case, it was a company that recorded €104 billion in profit and the Government still argues to this day that it did not have to pay a penny tax in this State or anywhere in the world. That sums up the approach of Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael.

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