Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

On the restrictions and moving out of level 5, the Government should be in a position towards the end of next week to tell the country where we are going to be on 1 December. There will be a meeting of the Cabinet Covid sub-committee and a Cabinet meeting and we will have advice and up-to-date data from NPHET. We will be giving Ireland a few days notice as to what 1 December is going to look like. As everyone knows, the numbers are not what we would like them to be. The number of new cases fell rapidly but they have pretty much stopped falling in the last week. There is another week or two to go yet. NPHET has set a target of having the R number at 0.5 and cases at around 100 but that is not a target that the Government endorsed. It is a target we noted, but not one we endorsed. The target we have set is the R number being consistently below 1 and cases falling. The Taoiseach has said, and I very much agree, that the aim is to get to some form of level 3 at the start of December, which is less than we might like it to be but there is flexibility within level 3. There are more things allowed in level 3 that people may necessarily think and we can ease things from there. We all know what is going to happen once we ease restrictions; namely, the number of cases will start to rise again. We want to, if possible, reach a steady state so that we do not need to have a third set of tough restrictions in January or February, and allow us to buy time until we have a vaccine available and deployed.

On the CRSS, one of the examples that comes up a lot is the home catering sector. While people in this sector can benefit from the employment wage subsidy scheme, they would not benefit from the CRSS because they may not have a premises. They can reclaim some corporation profit tax from last year if they were profitable. It is one of those areas that we will take a look at. Even though they are not technically closed because of the restrictions the Government has imposed, they are de facto closed as a result of the restrictions the Government has imposed because the premises that they would serve are now closed. We need to be cautious because if we start opening up CRSS to the entire supply chain, the cost of that may be very high

On the CRO, there is some flexibility being offered already. The CRO has eased a number of obligations under the Companies Act but we would be happy to look at further possibilities in that regard. I call on the CRO to engage with companies that may have difficulties filing returns for good reasons. It is not there to catch them out but we still require companies to fulfil their statutory obligations.

In terms of the different financial supports that the Government provides, whether it is grants or loans, we do publish, weekly, how much is being paid and the drawdown for each scheme. I take the point that it would be good to do that on a county or regional level so that we know that there is a fair distribution of it around the country. That is easy to do for initiatives such as the restart grant because that was done through the local authorities, and we can publish that and make it available, but it is sometimes harder to do for a company that might be headquartered in Dublin or Cork with offices all over the country and so on. It is not always as straightforward as it may seem but the point about making as much data as possible available at NUTS 2 or 3 level, is one I support and endorse. We had planned to do a project on that anyway. We will do that and follow up on the point made.