Fine Gael MEP Brian Hayes this week told the Irish Independent newspaper that the taxation plan was “unacceptable” in at the absence of proper studies of how member states would be affected individually.

The EU describes the Common Consolidated Corporate Tax Base (CCCTB), proposed as far back as 2011 and on the table since October 2016, as a “modern, fair and competitive corporate tax framework”; and “a single set of rules to calculate companies’ taxable profits in the EU”.

If implemented, the CCCTB would see corporate taxes applied in countries where the companies sell their goods and services, rather than in the States where the companies’ regional headquarters are located, and then divided between EU countries on an agreed basis.

MEP Hayes said the EU’s wish to roll out the CCCTB by the end of 2018 was, in the absence of impact assessments, “policymaking on the hoof” and “unacceptable”.

The Irish MEP has written to the EU’s economic commissioner, Pierre Moscovici, calling for the state-by-state assessments. To date, Mr Hayes claimed, Mr Moscovic had been unable to tell Irish leaders how CCCTB would impact on Ireland’s tax base.

In late 2016, Mr Moscovici insisted that the EU was responding to a “new world” where “people want transparency and want the multinationals to pay their fair share of tax where they take profits”.

Ireland has long been opposed to CCCTB. Earlier this year, Finance Minister, Michael Noonan, said that the proposals could mean that profits taxed in Ireland could instead be apportioned to other EU States and taxed there. Minister Noonan declared to the Irish Independent that the proposal was in “breach of the OECD principles”.

Commentators have observed that Ireland’s opposition has usually been as part of a block of other smaller EU countries, alongside the much larger UK. Brexit has removed the UK from the equation, leaving the smaller countries exposed, as the European Commission has moved CCCTB to the centre of its priorities.

In this light, MEP Hayes’s communication with the economic commissioner assumes a new urgency. He reiterates an earlier call for individual impact assessments, claiming that the European Commission had never divulged “clear and comprehensive statistics” on the impacts of the proposal.

While noting Mr Moscovici’s claim that the CCCTB would result in a likely loss of 0.2 percent of Irish tax revenue, MEP Hayes said the Irish business organisation IBEC had estimated the potential loss at approximately 7.7 percent of tax revenue, or almost €4bn.

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