Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Will the Department provide any expertise to people trying to renegotiate utility and other costs? The officials might give me a written response on that.

The sole traders obviously fell outside the scope of the Covid supports. Have the Department any way of supporting them? Is it undertaking any mitigation exercises to allow them to come back into the marketplace which will be extremely difficult if they have not been able to cover their full costs over recent months? For small businesses, dealing with Departments and trying to claim subsidies tends to be very onerous. Does the Department have a digital dashboard in place in order that people can do this quickly and efficiently? One of our contributors this morning spoke of having to give up 12 to 14 hours a day with the children to spend all her time managing her business. I ask the witnesses to comment on that as well.

On the sole traders, it was regrettable that of about 4,500 providers in the sector, more than 1,000 are owner-managers who were not on the payroll. Therefore, when the Revenue temporary wage subsidy scheme was developed they had no option to go on the temporary wage subsidy scheme as they were not on the payroll. Their only option was the pandemic unemployment payment, so we could not top them up. We topped up other providers but we could not top them up because they were not on the Revenue scheme and our scheme layered on top of that. That was regrettable. What we did to assist them was give them overheads and we continued to make 15% of their staff costs or about 10% of their operational costs available to assist them with other overheads. As the Secretary General mentioned earlier, from 29 June they all will be able to open their doors again so they will have access to that €75 million just like others, including the capital and the reopening grant. They will not get the temporary wage subsidy scheme, so they will be missing out on that again. In speaking to the sector about this, we have told them that if they can get another two children it would match their pandemic unemployment payment, and if they can get three extra children it would give them more income. The doors are now open and they can come back in from 29 June and avail of this. We hope that, come September, demand from parents will increase even further and the funding they can access through our schemes would therefore come back as normal.