Feargal O’Rourke is one of the key backroom figures in the Irish elite.
Coming from a well-known Fianna Fáil dynasty, he was a managing partner at PWC for many years. There he was the go-to person for multinationals who wanted information on Ireland’s tax dodging schemes.
He was also the architect of the notorious ’Double Irish’ scheme which allowed companies like Google to cut billions off their tax bill by using Ireland and Bermuda.
But from January 1st O’Rourke took up a new job as chair of a state agency, the Industrial Development Authority. His appointment shows that the Irish state has no embarrassment promoting its tax reduction strategies.
Those on the left should however be more concerned.
In an interview with Matt Cooper, O’Rourke has effectively given a clean bill of health to Sinn Féin’s embrace of US multinationals. He praises their ‘outreach programme’ to US corporate executives and says that ‘They made it very clear that they have no issue with the corporate tax regime… and so their signal very much is that we’re not going to rock the boat’.
But as corporate pressure mounts on Sinn Féin, there is no end to the demands. The rich want even more.
O’Rourke makes a distinction between corporate tax and personal taxes and thinks that taxes on higher earners could be ‘one of the battlegrounds of the next election’.
Specifically, he states that Sinn Féin is looking at a wealth tax on high earners.
But in Sinn Féin’s pre-budget plan for 2023, the proposal of a 1% wealth tax did not appear.
Sinn Féin should now clarify if they still want a wealth tax or not.
And if they really were left-wing, they would tell the US multinationals that, at the very least, they must pay the same rate of tax on their profits as the average worker.
