Ms Deirdre Donaghy:

That is ideally the road we would go down. The worst situation is to have somebody stuck between the two, or half in one and half in the other. When we ran into the problems with the Commission that is what we then started to look at. If this is not a viable avenue, what are the alternatives because there is still a policy imperative to try to support the micro and small companies? To be honest, the main difficulty and why it has not progressed is that Covid-19 intervened. There was then a significant diversion of resources by both ourselves and Revenue to Covid-19 measures. We are hopefully coming out of that now and can come back to this. We are doing the review again this year and while there are other policy objectives we have to address this year as well, we are coming back to the idea of looking at what can we possibly do. We have one potential difficulty in the avenue suggested by the Deputy which was to separate it out. We then need to look at what happens with the main tax credit. If you separate it out and just have it for the uplift it becomes a 5% credit. That is probably too much of an administrative burden for just 5%. Ideally you would look to do that for the whole amount.