Mr. David Fitzsimons:

I thank the Chairman and the committee members for the invitation. Retail Excellence Ireland is a not-for-profit organisation. We are Ireland's largest retail representative body. We have about 1,700 company members that operate over 10,000 stores nationwide. We have offices in Ennis, County Clare, and in Dublin. I will be brief because I know the committee is running behind time.

In 2002, we conducted the largest piece of research into what drives town centres and what engages citizens to come and use their towns and villages ever conducted in the State. We found that six matters were of extreme importance. The first thing we found was that the key driver is proximity. I know that sounds pretty obvious but I am concerned that there may be many towns and villages whose plans of revival are based on getting tourists to come from Wales, for example, when a town or village should really be built for the people of the local area. If a great job is done for them, visitors will follow.

The second most important thing for a town's viability is the daytime offer. That involves retail, the local post office, the bank and perhaps a town crèche or library. If the offer is not fit for purpose, people will not come. In the Irish State today, far too much is made of car parking charges. That ranked sixth in importance. To be frank, there are some towns in the country in which if one actually paid people to park, they still would not come. The offer obviously has to be appropriate. Otherwise, everything else is meaningless.

The third most important issue was the evening economy, which is of great importance to many towns. The fourth most important issue was accessibility, which involves driving or getting in to the town the same way in the same amount of time each and every time. It is especially pertinent to women with children. The fifth most important issue was the public realm, beautification and such like. The sixth most important issue was car parking charges. Those are the fundamentals for us in terms of town revival.

Having done that research, we decided to become active. We are a not-for-profit organisation, but we invited the top 100 populated towns in the country to apply to work with us. Two were chosen, Limerick and Carlow. Carlow did not work for two key reasons. One reason was that they refused to define the inner core, as in, where the town centre was. We found that the shopping centre owner out the road and others obviously believed that they were a part of the town centre. As a result, our intervention was scattergun and did not work. Any retail investment we brought to the town was arguably invited to the shopping centre rather than the town centre.

In Limerick, we had a far different outcome. The county council CEO and economic development director were great. We did three things. One was to improve the offer. We went out and sold Limerick to retail and hospitality investors. More than 40 new stores opened up in an 18-month period. The second thing we did was to improve the public realm. The county council put money into Cruises Street. Money is also going into O'Connell Street. It is simple beautification and it does not need hundreds of thousands of euro spent on it. The beautification of the public realm can simply be three buildings either side of each other in a street being painted, the planting of trees, good signage or awnings put over front doors. The third thing we are working on at the moment is citizen engagement. It involves reminding the people of Limerick and the wider conurbation that it is their place and that there are lots of great things to come and do.

We are active in about 30 towns today, trying to advise and assist local stakeholder groups and town teams on how to be better. We have a very positive relationship with county councils. As the Chairman of the committee knows, Navan was selected on Saturday evening as Ireland's friendliest place as part of our awards programme. We are trying to get local authorities to nominate towns and to get behind businesses to be the best, drive service standards and engage customers.

How does one revive a town? The first thing I would advise is to establish a town team. The team needs to involve all stakeholders, young and old, including the Tidy Towns group, the chamber of commerce and more. It has to be inclusive. The second thing I would advise is to define the inner core. Start at the centre and work outwards. Define the centre, whether it is from Jack's pub to the pharmacy on the corner to the bank or whatever. That is where all the effort must be focused on. The third thing I would advise is to do everything possible to improve the offer. Big towns might be able to appeal to retailers to come and set up, but small towns can easily do stuff like hosting a mini-English market, which appeals to local artists and producers to come and trade with the people. English markets rules should apply, which means it would be rate controlled and rent controlled. It would offer a safe place for these people to come and do business.

We can improve the public realm, which does not involve lots of money. It can be simple stuff. We would always insist that the retail businesses would sign a statute of behaviour for what they need to do in terms of cleanliness, standards, opening on time, getting behind the town brand and any initiatives the town team has decided to run and engage the people of the town. We are bad at that in this country. We are very quick to think about how to get visitors to the place. However, for example, I live in Ennis and I am delighted that there are economic development directories agreed with a plan that we will put in place. We are designing a “my County Clare” card. Everyone in the county will be invited to sign up to it. When they go their local pub or restaurant, they will be asked whether they want to find out what is going on in their town.

We are going to build a citizen database and every two or three weeks we will e-zine and text people about what is happening in their county. It is not going to be about sales or retail offers but about great things to do - a family day, a duck race, an outdoor cinema night or whatever - to try to reacquaint people with their place. It is cheap. Irish consumers today desperately want mid-week convenience, to nip in and out to the shops, but weekend experience. Tonight and tomorrow night there will be families sitting around every kitchen table in the country talking about what they will do at the weekend. Families are travelling further for an experience. That is why places such as the Arboretum Garden Centre in Carlow or Ballyseedy in Tralee or The Orchard in Celbridge are doing well because they offer food, retail, something to do and a day out. Towns can do that, if we work together positively.

I have three requests for the committee. Please get behind our town revival pilot programme that we have pitched on many occasions to Government. It is an educational programme for ten towns over a 12-month period in partnership with the Association of Town Centre Management in the United Kingdom which has been helping small villages and towns to be better for 25 years. We get on great with local authorities and county councils but we believe their skill set around town management is poor. They do not have the skills that Don Nugent in Dundrum Town Centre has. When a vacancy, accessibility or cleanliness issue arises in Dundrum, something happens. We probably do not have the same skills in Ireland.

The second request is that we have to pitch in with the Department of Communications, Climate Action and Environment around an accelerator programme to get small retail and general businesses online. While we welcome the digital voucher, it is not visionary enough and €2,500 on a voucher will not go very far. There is a department store in Ballybofey in the back end of Donegal called McElhinneys, which off its own bat has built a 14,000 sq. ft. warehouse that is about to open. It sells to 65 countries. This year €560 billion will be spent across Europe. We are not visionary enough in helping small rural businesses go online and take on the world. We would love for this accelerator programme to be funded by Government. It involves taking 15 businesses and helping them with Enterprise Ireland standard support. Any modern economy has three main pillars: export, which we are brilliant at with Enterprise Ireland and Origin Green. Second is foreign direct investment and we are brilliant at that. My sister is on the board of IDA Ireland. After last night we might not be so good but we do our best. The third pillar is the domestic economy and, to be frank, we do very little for businesses here, especially rural ones. If McElhinneys can do what they do and employ 190 people in a small provincial village in Donegal, I am sure there are many others we need to get behind and support.

The third request is for larger towns and that Government would introduce use it or lose it legislation for big box retailers who are sitting on vacant property in the centre of towns, which is killing towns. The county chief executive in Wexford, Tom Enright, has been very vocal about a national grocery brand, one that we should be proud of as a large and profitable retailer, causing the greatest distress and upheaval in town revival. While there is good reason for smaller properties not to be let because there is no tenant to be found, to have these huge boxes vacant in town centres with this brand happily paying rates to keep competitors out of the town is destroying 24 towns today.