Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses. Well done to them on their work so far. It has been a rocky two years and they have done a lot to help businesses to stay afloat. Unfortunately, it is impossible to save everybody. I have engaged with both the LEOs and Enterprise Ireland repeatedly in my role as spokesperson for enterprise, trade and employment. I might send a circular to Deputy O'Reilly about the supports provided to date, because despite what she says, the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications and the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment have worked together to come up with lots of strong funding for the greening of the enterprise sector through LEOs and Enterprise Ireland. A significant amount of work is also being done in upskilling. There are hundreds of new jobs and courses in upskilling to get people into the workforce where we need them for Rebuilding Ireland and the green economy.

As a member of the Green Party, I will focus on that. I secured funding in the most recent budget to support LEOs, and Enterprise Ireland in giving better and more supports, and expertise, to small and medium enterprises on how they can go green and reduce their carbon footprints. It is now time to have targets. Let us see the carbon reduction. Green for Micro is welcome, as are the other initiatives, including the lean concepts. I would like to hear more about what the lean intervention actually is.

Mr. McElwee referred to 293 million green consultancies. I have two questions on that. Will he expand on what exactly that is? Are there targets of, say, a 10% carbon reduction or how is that being done so we know it is effective? What can we do to ensure more of an uptake? We need to see an increase in the uptake of the great services our guests are providing that will help to make businesses more economically sustainable, as well as environmentally sustainable. It is important that we all work together.

I do not think our guests' jobs are to talk about workers' rights. My experience of the SME sector shows that most employers, when they train somebody up, want to hold onto them. It takes a lot of time and energy to train somebody up. It is important we recognise that fact. I know many people who own small businesses and the last thing they want to be doing is losing employees and having to do it all again and employ somebody else. The SME sector has done very well in holding onto staff. It is not the case that workers' rights are being dismissed by businesses and employers do not take care of them. My experience of small businesses is that they take great care of their staff because they want to hold onto them. Our guests have probably found that too. They have probably not observed large amounts of people leaving small businesses because of mistreatment. We must have a nuanced debate around that. It is not simply a case of all workers need to get better pay and all employers do not take care of their workers.

The lean interventions and the green consultancy are important, as Deputy Stanton mentioned. I know there is two-day mentoring but what is the next step? Small businesses are busy. We nearly need to do more for them to get them over the line, whether that is packaging or looking at their heating system and turning it into an air-to-water system. I remember describing the air-to-water system to the Tánaiste, Deputy Varadkar, when I met him on the pre-budget submissions I made on decarbonising the SME sector. He committed €22 million to that programme. I am interested to see the roll-out of that and to hear how it is progressing. It is important to acknowledge the fact that the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, Deputy Harris, have worked well and hard on creating new centres of excellence for upskilling through two-day and four-day courses for existing tradesmen and entire courses to get people into trades to prepare for the new green economy. I know for a fact the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications met the Institute of Guidance Counsellors twice and there is a good circular available about all the green courses that are coming online. The Government, LEOs and Enterprise Ireland need to do more to promote those courses and get people into them. That is something on which we must look at doing more. We have created the courses and now we need to increase the uptake. It is good that the Minister for Environment, Climate and Communications has flagged that with the guidance counsellors. We need to do more work on that because we have created the courses and extra funding for tradesmen to take on apprenticeships. A great deal of work has been done but now we need to get it out there. That is why I wonder about the low uptake of the green consultancy and Lean interventions. There are not massive numbers availing of them, when you consider the amount of SMEs in Ireland.

That is all I want to say. Our guests are doing great work. It has been a tough two years so I do not want to criticise them. However, we do have a climate emergency. We need to forget about Covid-19 and go for it.