Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the judgment. In future, I hope the Minister will listen and take heed of what Teachta Doherty is telling him because once again he has been proven right. He was not alone. The Government was warned repeatedly that the inevitable outcome of its challenge would be this money being returned to the State. The reputational damage done by the wrong-headed Government, with the support of the Labour Party and Independents cannot be calculated. It was never about tax sovereignty; it was always about state aid and one company benefiting from preferential treatment that was simply not available to other companies. Despite the warnings, Fine Gael, with the enthusiastic support of Fianna Fáil, Labour and 11 Independents supported taking the case and in doing so spent more than €10 million of taxpayers money fighting a case that it would never win. That vote was in 2016. I laughed out loud when I heard the Taoiseach and others trying to claim that this is somehow a legacy issue. The vote took place in 2016. The case is the same age as my grandson. It is not a legacy issue. It is about this Government and how it behaves and its attitude. The reputational damage that has been done is on it.

In 2016, many households and businesses were still struggling with the impact of austerity. How many businesses closed? How many people had their lives turned upside down in that time? All the while, the Government used taxpayers' money to fight against the collection of more than €13 billion in taxes that were lawfully due to this State. Naturally, people are thinking about what could have been done with this money in the intervening years.

People in my area in Fingal ask why we waited decades for a swimming pool. There are clubs facing the prospect of turning kids away for the want of playing pitches and every single day in my offices in Swords and Balbriggan and in my clinics right across Fingal, I see people who are absolutely desperate to access secure, affordable housing. There are no shortage of reasons the Government was wrong to fight this case and there is nothing more certain than that the people who fought this case are not the people who should be left to spend this money.

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