Mr. John A. Moran:

The SME sector employs 1 million people and 1.5 million people rely on the SME sector for their livelihood. This is the most significant employment part of the State and it therefore needs to be supported.

The way in which this has been analysed is that if we are going to have people on employment anyway, it makes more sense to support their employment while they are with SMEs. That is very helpful because it keeps those people on income support and, therefore, they can spend money in the economy. Also, they get safety and security, like we talked about confidence earlier, of knowing that they will not lose their jobs because their employers run out of money to pay their wages.

However, the employers may still run out of money, and that is why relying only on income support is not going to work.

If those employers are not supported and run out of money trying to pay other bills, they will not have a business in which to employ people, no matter how much we try to support employees' income in the coming six to ten months. We will have a significant problem.

The Deputy is correct that the unemployment rate is 22%. She may remember that in the previous crisis we had the advantage of knowing that Irish unemployment rates would plateau at a certain level because people could emigrate to other countries where things were going better. As we know, they did so. This time around, it is very different. There is no emigration release for those who are being made unemployed. What is even more frightening than the 22% unemployment rate to which the Deputy referred is the number of young people who are unemployed. They were predominantly employed in the SME sector, particularly outside Dublin, in rural areas and smaller towns and cities. We are at rates of 50% or 60% in respect of youth unemployment. It is essential that we get those people back to work as quickly as possible. Not only are there mental distress issues eating away at their hearts, these are the formative years of their careers. This is not just about one year of income lost - it will have a much bigger impact on their working career throughout their life. That is why Ms McCabe and other small business owners need to hire young people to get back into work and be trained at an early age. They are the ones who will probably decide to leave the business next year after having received good training and go on to open their own shops and hire more people. That must be the methodology we use to climb out of this situation.