Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I hope the Minister will present himself before this committee again soon on the following matter. We learned from RTÉ in the last week that the entire Disabled Drivers Medical Board of Appeal resigned en massein October. Nobody in this committee was aware of this to my knowledge and Members of the Oireachtas were not aware of it. This was seven months after the board met the Minister and told him about their dissatisfaction, that they could not stand over this scheme and criticised the lack of progress. Now we have a scheme that is up in the air so the Minister needs to present himself before the committee on that. Hopefully the committee will make time to have a proper and dedicated session on that. I know that matter is not on the agenda for today but I wanted to raise it given the importance of this scheme and the fact that a whole board resigned and the Minister did not tell anybody. That is a serious problem for a committee that is supposed to oversee the work of the Department and there are serious issues here.

I will start with the dividends and I think the Minister is wrong on this. This should never have happened and it is taxpayers' money. The EWSS and its predecessor are valued and welcome schemes and without them we know the impact there would have been on companies and jobs; that goes without saying. However, in March 2020 before the scheme was ever envisaged, I wrote to the Minister and spoke about how we needed to bring forward a scheme to support employers and employees. As part of that communication I said it was crucial that this could not be a subsidy to shareholders through dividends. The Government brought forward a scheme and rushed legislation through. We know the importance of it and why it was rushed but the Minister’s counterpart in Britain ensured that dividends could not be paid out and the ECB ensured that banks could not pay dividends out.

If one takes O’Flaherty Holdings, for example, which is involved in Mercedes-Benz, it received €1.8 million in taxpayer support to its company and it paid out dividends to its Isle of Man shareholders of €1.8 million. That was a transfer of taxpayers’ money to shareholders in the Isle of Man and that should not have happened. The Minister should recognise that there was a mistake and flaw in the design of that scheme. To say we are keeping this under review is just political speak which seeks to get over this hump. That should never have happened. The Minister is suggesting that if it did not pay out the dividends this year it would have done so in two or three years’ time but that is not necessarily the case. For example, nobody knew how the pandemic would continue. Why did the ECB place a ban on all Irish and European banks paying dividends for 2020 and up to the third quarter of 2021?