Gerry Horkan (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Senator Coghlan is even younger now than he was in 1861. First, I will briefly mention the sad passing of Rory Kiely whom I knew quite well. A great Limerick man, a great Senator and a great Fianna Fáil person, he was a Member of the House for almost 30 years, bar a few months in 1982. He was also a former Cathaoirleach of the Seanad. I met him in the car park only two or three weeks ago. He was with former Deputy John Cregan and we had a bit of a chat. I assumed I would see him again quite soon. It is a sad occasion. I extend my sympathies to all his family and friends and his supporters in Limerick and throughout the country.

There are a number of matters I would like to mention today but I can only raise one topic. I acknowledge that this week is both bike week and men's health week and we should be cognisant of that. I am lucky to live close enough to cycle in this morning. All of us who cycle or who drive and take account of cyclists should try and embrace it as much as we can.

I raise the issue mentioned in The Irish Timestoday that Ireland is the world's greatest tax haven. I refute that. The report from a certain group of academics needs to be challenged. I have not yet read the report. I do not know if it has been published but The Irish Timeshas been reporting on it. The definition of tax haven they were using dates from 1993 and the world has changed a lot since then. The report focuses particularly on 2015, which is the year when much intellectual property, IP, was transferred to Ireland. That was done for many sensible reasons, however, including the fact that most of the intellectual property was transferred here because most intellectual property is being generated here and is being used here. Microsoft has more than 2,000 staff here. Apple has in excess of 7,000 staff in the Leader's area in Cork. Large companies such as eBay, Facebook, PayPal and Uber are all in Ireland.

I will put on the record some of what Ireland has done in recent years. We have done a breathtaking amount of work on corporation tax reform. We have had a general anti-avoidance rule since 1989. This is one of the first countries in the world to have one. It has only been introduced in most EU countries as part of anti-tax avoidance directive. We introduced mandatory disclosure domestically in 2011, and the UK and Portugal were the only countries in the EU which had done so before us. We will be exchanging mandatory reporting disclosures with other countries across the EU from 2020. We participate in EU code of conduct groups and the OECD forum on harmful tax practice. I, as a member of the Joint Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach, have been at OECD meetings representing Ireland and putting Ireland's case forward at the OECD. It is a bit rich to be calling the OECD a "club for rich countries" when, in fact, more than 100 countries are involved in the base erosion and profit shifting, BEPS, process that is being administered by the OECD. We were the first EU country to adopt country-by-country reporting in 2016 - well ahead of everybody else. We were an early adopter of the FatCow, which is an exchange of information with the US tax authorities, and the fourth country to adopt it in 2011. We have adopted all the amendments to the EU directive on administrative co-operation. We have adopted the OECD common reporting standards. We have engaged in automatic exchange of information country-by-country reporting. We were awarded the highest rating for transparency by the OECD peer review last year. We signed the EU anti-tax avoidance directive. As part of that, we will be introducing controlled foreign company, CFC, rules from January 2019.