Following the ruling from the EU Commission that Apple should pay Ireland €13 billion in unpaid tax, debate has circulated around whether or not Ireland should appeal the decision.
Politicians from both sides of the argument have vocalised their concerns, with Finance Minister Michael Noonan pushed for an appeal due to “reputational concerns” and Donegal TD Pearse Doherty saying “the damage to Ireland’s reputation is already done… there is no logical reason to appeal [the] ruling”.
If, in the end, Ireland receives the €13 billion, there are quite a few things the government could spend it on (if we don’t have to hand it over towards our national debt).
The Irish Times wrote an article yesterday on a national scale. However, we wanted to focus on Donegal – how can our local communities benefit?
For arguments sake, if we imagine that all 40 constituencies in Ireland got an equal slice of the pie, that would mean each constituency would get €325 million – Donegal could benefit from €650 million as we have two constituencies; Donegal north-east, and Donegal south-west.
So what could we get with €650,000,000?
Lots of nurses
According to the INMO, the starting salary for a staff nurse is €27,485. That means that Donegal could pay 782 graduate nurses for a little over 30 years.
Hospitals
We could build a brand new state of the art hospital for €650,000,000 (which is within the ballpark of the budget allocated for St. James’ new children’s hospital in Dublin).
Chocolate…
With a population of 158,755 people, there would be €4094 per person. The government could give each person in Donegal 16,376 Freddo bars.
Teachers
With the average starting salary of €28,092 for a teacher, we could pay over 578 graduate teachers for 40 years.
Roadworks
It costs an estimated €8 million to build one kilometer of motorway, meaning we could build a massive 3 lane motorway from Glenveagh National Park all the way down to the outskirts of Ballyshannon.
All-weather pitches
The average price of a square meter of astroturf costs €14.50. What if we wanted to build an all-weather pitch spanning a whole acre? No problem.
We could actually build 11,079 of them, which would cover a little over a quarter of Glenveagh National Park.
Donegal county council could be self sufficient for almost five years (based on 2016 budget allocations)
Education
We could pay for 170,201 student’s tuition fees for a standard level 8 course at Letterkenny University of Technology.
Based on the cost of Letterkenny’s new Educate Together School – we could build 295 more of these schools.
Hospital budget
Despite being the sixth largest hospital in the country, Letterkenny University Hospital receives two to three times less than Dublin hospitals. LUH gets €4,788 per inpatient whereas St. James’ Hopsital gets €13,750. We could give this a massive boost.
Although some of these examples are far-fetched, it just demonstrates how much money a fraction of the €13 billion is actually worth in tangible terms.
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