Mr. Daragh Connolly:

I thank Senator Ó Céidigh for his excellent questions. The recruitment issue of which he spoke has been already addressed and the consequences for SMEs has been handled nicely by Mr. Duggan. I will speak to the make-up of community pharmacies, the ownership of same and on Brexit.

I am a third generation pharmacist. My grandmother qualified as a pharmacist in 1925. She should have qualified in 1922 but there were a few things going on in the make-up of our State at that time. Every generation of pharmacists, retailers, businesspeople and entrepreneurs have to develop new ideas to suit the new circumstances in which they find themselves. I am very proud that pharmacists are entrepreneurs. We use ingenuity and our business practice. What we use most is the rapport that we have with our patients in our communities. The most liberal laws around the ownership and operation of pharmacies in the world are in Ireland. Anybody can open up a pharmacy anywhere. Across Europe a pharmacy may only be owned by a pharmacist and he or she is only allowed to open a pharmacy in an area where there is a demonstrable need for such a service. As such, in terms of investment in a community that does not have a service, a pharmacist would have security of tenure. We have none of that in Ireland.

Senator Ó Céidigh spoke about international ownership of pharmacies in Ireland.

Interestingly, international ownership sits very well with the ownership model that Ms Horan or I use, whereby we own our own pharmacies. Looking at the statistics around pharmacy ownership in Ireland as reflected in our membership, roughly 15% of pharmacies are owned by public limited companies, plcs, which probably have an international flavour. The committee members will probably know what firms I mean without naming them. Some 85% of pharmacies are owned by people like Ms Horan and myself or our families. Believe it or not, I actually think that is a good mix. The Irish Pharmacy Union, IPU, represents all types of pharmacies with all types of ownership models. I am very happy to be the president of an organisation like that because I think we can speak with one voice to legislators here in Leinster House and to the Department of Health when it comes to driving change.

I will be very specific about the question of what we can do to adapt. A pharmacist can pick up the phone to the Irish Pharmacy Union and speak to Mr. Darren Kelly, a colleague of Mr. Curran. Mr. Kelly will come to the business and carry out a retail review. He will start out on the street and go from the front door to the back door. He will look at the books and advise that the business needs to do more of this and less of that, or to move particular products to a certain area of the shop. Mr. Kelly does three of those reviews a week. He is very busy with that and there is a huge uptake. When we run courses on management and on how to be a better retailer we see a huge uptake on the part of community pharmacists. There is still an ingenuity there. There is a spirit of entrepreneurialism and of not giving up.

In luxury items such as perfumes, we are starting to see a leakage to online purchasing, or purchasing in airports where customers do not have to pay VAT. We have to suffer the consequence of that. I will not go into that, because I am sure it has been addressed by other witnesses who have addressed the committee. Those retailers do not pay rates or VAT. Nothing comes back into local communities like Ms Horan's and my own. It can be very frustrating when someone comes into my business with a broken bottle of perfume to see if I will swap it for a new one when they bought the bottle in the duty-free in Dubai or wherever they were. To answer the question very specifically, we are certainly under the pump, just as everybody else is. That is particularly the case with the Financial Emergency Measures in the Public Interest Acts, FEMPI. We have no vision of when they will be unwound or what unwinding looks like. It is hugely frustrating to be asking for the ability to add value back into the system when we do not get a reply from the Department. We have put 13 different proposals forward and we have not had meaningful engagement on any of them bar one. We are frustrated, but we are here to tell the committee that we can do more. We can add more back into our communities from a business perspective and from a healthcare perspective.