Mr. Liam Fitzgerald:

The largest cohort of people who have not been able to effectively access any support at the moment are the supplier SMEs.

The live performance support scheme, LPSS, and the Covid-19 restrictions support scheme, CRSS, was of some degree of help to public-facing Event Industry Alliance, EIA, venues but one's premises must be public-facing and have a reduced footfall. A sound or an audiovisual supplier, the people who supply the fences, barriers, the queueing systems, the ticket checking or scanning systems and all manner of suppliers of stewarding security such as that do not have premises, and in particular, do not have public-facing premises in many cases. These are the people who have been hardest hit so far in not being able to access supports. One is talking about warehouses with millions of euros worth of lights and sound equipment, for example, and miles and miles of fencing that should normally be surrounding fields at this time of year, and it is instead gathering dust in warehouses. Clearly, rent still has to paid on those warehouses and on the insurance for that equipment. They also still have leases and loans in many cases on that equipment. We are working very hard on this at the moment, in co-operation with the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment, to try to come up with a scheme that specifically targets these businesses because there have been schemes that specifically targeted certain parts of the tourism industry but the supplier SMEs have been left behind somewhat at this stage. They have been shut for 12 months now because without venues being open they cannot earn a living.