Mr. Neil McDonnell:

I thank the Deputy. With regard to the recent lockdowns, what we saw last year in the lead-up to Christmas was that many town and city centre businesses did especially badly. Ironically, this was mirrored by some suburban and outside town businesses doing extraordinarily well. I have to acknowledge this. If we have a second Christmas of very bad trading, it will exacerbate the situation.

The cost issues the Deputy referred to are significant. It is not just an Irish issue. European energy prices have increased on average by 20% this year. This is on reduced trading in many areas. Without taking over the meeting with a sundry list of problems, if we look at the big numbers for Ireland, our GDP is expanding at a rate that is not seen in any of the other developed economies. Our GDP is on fire. Last year, our GNI contracted but it is moving ahead this year. It is forecast to move by 5%. What we see is a continuing divergence between our multinational and domestic economies. We are not satisfied there is sufficient political and economic focus on our SME sector. To put it in simple terms, Israel has a population just about twice the size of ours and has 440 listed companies on its stock exchange. I know we cannot make a direct comparison with Dublin because we have big stock exchanges nearby but we have 22 or 23 listed companies for a population of 5 million. Our domestic economy is not in the health our foreign multinational economy is in. This is where we would like to see the political focus.