Bernard Durkan (Kildare North, Fine Gael)
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58. To ask the Minister for Finance the extent to which he remains satisfied that EU authorities, in respect of taxation and state aid, are not attempting to determine Irish taxation policy, with particular reference to the need to ensure that the taxes applied to manufacturing arising from foreign direct investment here apply only to the manufacturing that has taken place in this jurisdiction and that profits derived from manufacturing in other jurisdictions should be subject to corporate profits tax in the jurisdictions in which they are made; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [48672/17]

Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael)
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Ireland has never accepted the Commission’s analysis in the Apple State Aid Decision. An appeal has therefore been brought before the European Courts.  Such an appeal takes the form of an application to the General Court of the European Union, asking it to annul the Decision of the Commission.

The Attorney General prepared the legal grounds in support of the annulment proceedings and the application has been lodged in the General Court of the European Union. As is normal practice, a summary of these has been published in the Official Journal of the European Union.  This has also been published on the Department of Finance’s website.

As outlined in this published summary, one of the lines of argument in Ireland’s annulment application is that the Commission has exceeded its powers and interfered with national tax sovereignty. The Commission has no competence, under State Aid rules, unilaterally to substitute its own view of the geographic scope and extent of the Member State’s tax jurisdiction for those of the Member State itself.

As this topic is the subject of open legal proceedings, it will not be possible to comment further, in particular on any of the individual elements of the State’s legal case in defence of our position. This is important to ensure that we do not prejudice our own legal case.