David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein)

This is one of these extraordinary scandals where the Government has thrown out more red herrings than the amount of euro in that bank account holding the Apple money. The Government hides behind the notion that we had to fight the good fight for Apple because of the jobs. This was a special tax arrangement that was put in place for one company. It is about tax justice and every company has to pay its fair share of taxes. The Government has been caught out. The Irish State was caught out in relation to tax arrangements which should never have been put in place. The Government moved to close down many of the loopholes, coming, it has to be said, from pressure from the Opposition and TDs like Pearse Doherty and others.

That practice of fighting the good fight as the Government saw it for Apple was at the expense of the Irish taxpayer and was at the expense of working-class communities when obviously austerity had been in play for many years. In fact, many of those working-class communities have not fully recovered from that, including in Dublin, Dublin inner city and in my constituency in Waterford. The Pobal index sets out very clearly where we have very high levels of disadvantage and very high levels of poverty. Where people do not have sporting infrastructure, cultural infrastructure, arts infrastructure and even obviously school places, garda numbers and all of those things, that adds to the strains and pressures on those working-class communities.

It is intergenerational; it goes on from one generation to the next because no government has ever taken addressing those issues in working-class communities as seriously as it should have. They have essentially abandoned them, left them behind and then wonder why we have all the difficulties and challenges that we do. That is why, as the Minister of State knows, we proposed a €1 billion fund to be directed at those constituencies and those areas where there are high levels of disadvantage and where those communities had the bear the brunt of austerity at a time when the Government was facilitating the tax arrangements for Apple that meant that billions of euro in revenue that should have been coming to the Irish taxpayer was not.

Many people have spoken about a whole range of ways in which the Apple money can now be spent and obviously that is a decision the next Government will have to make. It is accepted that we have a housing crisis and we need to build more homes.

I could point to my area, health, where we do not have the hospital beds we need and so on. Not only did the Government not fight the good fight for the people, it also did not fight the good fight for those working-class communities it still leaves behind every single day.

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