Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I will deal with each of those points in turn. We have figures of the breakdown by sector of people in receipt of the pandemic unemployment payment, PUP, and wage subsidy scheme. I will have those figures sent to the committee. The composition will not come as a surprise to members and the sectors affected most include construction, retail and hospitality. They formed a very large share of either employers on the wage subsidy scheme or former workers on the PUP.

The challenge I face in engaging sectors is that there is a range of Ministers who come before a range of Oireachtas committees and they must engage with the sectors for which they have responsibility. I have to respect that. After our previous engagement in the Dáil, I raised with the Minister for Transport, Deputy Eamon Ryan, the concerns mentioned by the Deputy about taxi drivers and the role of the National Transport Authority, NTA. I raised the matter with the NTA as well.

On the arts and performance sector, which relates to the questions put to me by Deputy O'Donnell, I am very much aware that there are really important parts of our society that have been adversely affected. A life without concerts or theatre is a very different life to look forward to. I fully appreciate that. I am really aware of those who are affected by this disease in that way. The Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, Deputy Michael McGrath, in his engagement concerning spending with other Ministers is also looking at this.

Many governments are grappling with this and not many have found a clear or effective solution. It is very difficult for the Government to be able to step in and entirely take the place of live audiences or regular live events happening while compensating all the revenue without setting off big challenges in doing the same for the rest of the economy. This is the matter we have considered now for quite a while.

The Deputy mentioned that some parts of the economy are doing better than others and that is the case. We made changes in the employment wage subsidy scheme and there are many parts of our economy that were able to manage that change in subsidy.

They were reopened or they were doing well at the time the change in subsidy was made. That, I believe, will be evidenced when we are able to point to the number of employers on the new scheme. I accept that, at the point we made the change in the subsidy, other things happened in the economy and in our public health guidance that created an issue for important employers in our country and their workers. It goes back to the big challenge we have here that even in this phase of dealing with Covid, the so-called multi-speed Irish economy is now moving in different cycles. This is something the Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath, and I are looking at in terms of how we deal with it from a policy point of view.

On collateralised loan obligations, CLOs, and what the Deputy referred to in terms of commercial property risks, globally that is one of the set of challenges that are there. From an Irish point of view, the Deputy will remember the years of debates we had in this room regarding the owners of commercial property in Ireland. The relationship of the Irish banking sector and our domestic economy with the owners of commercial property is now different from what it was a number of years ago. If certain trends in commercial property were to develop, while it will have an impact on our banking sector and we will have to evaluate what that impact would be, the Irish banking sector is no longer the only owner of commercial property in Ireland. That is a big change from where we were a decade ago.

On fiscal rules, it will not surprise the Deputy to hear me say I would make the opposite argument to his, namely, the fact that most countries in Europe, including our own, went into this crisis with public finances that were balanced, in surplus or had smaller deficits allowed two things to happen. First, it helped with the European Central Bank making its huge intervention to support the selling of government debt across this period of the crisis. Second, countries had a capacity available to them to borrow huge amounts of money quickly. It makes a big difference to our economic fortunes that we can now borrow money as a semi-core European economy as opposed to where we were when we were dealing with another global crisis a decade ago. That makes a huge difference to our country's ability to fund the things we will need to fund in the future.