Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

Deputy Doherty and I have asked questions about the PUP. I am still getting slightly conflicting signals from the Minister and would like to get a bit of clarity on the PUP. Some sectors will, of course, recover, As public health restrictions are lifted, people will be able to go back to work and they will not be on the PUP, so the Minister will not need to maintain it for them. In respect of continued public health restrictions or the scarring effect on particular areas, a few of which I have mentioned, such as aviation, music, entertainment, certain areas of hospitality and tourism, since people's loss of employment and income results from Government public health policy, can the Minister give an assurance that he will maintain supports for those groups because otherwise he is, in effect, punishing those worst hit by the pandemic? This would be pretty ironic considering, as the Minister pointed out, some people have not been impacted economically at all and some sectors of our economy and some of the wealthiest people and most profitable businesses have done extremely well during the pandemic. It would be grossly unfair to pull supports from the worst affected while others have done extremely well in the pandemic. The Minister should give assurances that he will not do that at any point when the loss of income and employment is not the fault of these people but is a consequence of the pandemic and measures the Government took to address it. If the Minister does not give this assurance, people will be very angry.

Another question I put to the Minister last week to which I have not received an answer is in the same ball park. Why has the Government consistently refused to extend schemes like the CRSS and the CBAS, the grant support schemes for people who have ongoing fixed costs that they cannot cover because of loss of revenue, to people who do not have rateable premises? Those groups have been as badly hit - in some cases, even worse - as those with premises but the Minister has refused to extend the grant support schemes to them. Again, I refer to musicians, taxi drivers, people in events and so on. Why is the Government not giving them support when they are some of the worst hit when it comes to covering their fixed costs and when the debts they are accumulating are going to make it very hard for them to recover?