“That’s an issue that has to be addressed first of all in those jurisdictions,” Mr. Gilmore told reporters in Brussels.

The charge by the Senate subcommittee that Apple avoided paying $44 billion in taxes in the United States by keeping the bulk of its $102 billion cash hoard offshore has struck a nerve here in a recession-racked country where unemployment is 15 percent and the government is looking for ways to repay an 80 billion euro bailout, now equivalent to $103 billion, that it received from the European Union and the International Monetary Fund in 2010.

“There is something wrong with this picture — the revenues of these companies keep increasing while our workers are getting crushed,” said Peter Mathews, a chartered accountant who is also a member of the Irish Parliament for the governing Fine Gael party. “Apple’s cash pile is about the size of our national income. Why not have them pay a 4 percent levy to contribute to our national recovery?”

Apple, which set up its first overseas headquarters in 1980 in Cork to assemble Macintosh computers, has a long history with the Irish. Its 4,000 workers — the largest Apple labor force in Europe — is significant in a country of only 4.6 million people. Apple’s employees assemble iMacs and Mac Pros and are also engaged in research, customer service and other support functions. “Our tax system may be lax, but in exchange we get jobs and more foreign investment,” said Stephen Kinsella, an economist at the University of Limerick who contributes to the influential Irish Economy blog. “No doubt about it, the benefits outweigh the costs.”

Irish politicians through the years have stood behind the country’s official 12.5 percent corporate tax rate, so much so that three years ago when the previous government negotiated the international bailout, it refused to budge when European negotiators wanted to make a higher tax rate a condition for a deal.

Government figures show that in 2010 the effective rate on the gross income of companies here was only 6 percent, and economists say that in some cases — as with Apple — it can go lower than that. That stands in contrast to the effective corporate tax rate in other countries: 29 percent in the United States, 22 percent in Britain, 27 percent for France and 24 percent for Germany.