Varadkar: Corporation tax change won't damage Ireland's bid to attract investors

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said there were more than a quarter of a million people working in multinationals in Ireland, and that probably spins off another 100,000 or 200,000 jobs, mostly in the big cities but not exclusively.

Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said the change in the country's corporation tax rate will not in any way undermine Ireland's proposition as a good place to invest for multinationals.

Following Ireland’s decision to sign up to it, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) announced its revised framework agreement in Paris on global corporate tax reform.

The deal will see big multinationals pay an effective minimum global rate of 15%.

Mr Varadkar said there were more than a quarter of a million people working in multinationals in Ireland, and that probably spins off another 100,000 or 200,000 jobs, mostly in the big cities but not exclusively.

"We've worked closely with them over the past year so we didn't make this decision without the IDA and without the American Chamber and those firms, knowing what we were planning on doing," he told reporters in Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim.

The main thing that they say to us is that they want is certainty. They want to know that whatever the rate is that it's not going to go up and down, and they want to know that whatever rate we have it's going to be competitive, it's going to be lower than our competitor countries, and that that's something we've secured.

"So I think what the IDA said today is absolutely right, this will not in any way undermine Ireland's proposition as a place to invest," Mr Varadkar said.

The reforms have been brokered by the OECD among 140 countries, as part of a widespread agenda to modernise global tax rules, to make them fairer, and reduce the use of aggressive tax planning by some large multinational companies.

The agreement has two key strands.

The first strand permits a proportion of profits from sales made by multinationals to be taxed in countries where those sales are made, while the second strand seeks to introduce a global minimum effective corporation tax rate of 15% to be applied to the profits of companies with annual sales of over €750m.