Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

We do not have projections for company insolvencies but we do think that they will increase. The number of companies that have gone bust and insolvent in the past couple of years has been extremely low. What did happen was that many businesses that would otherwise have failed have managed to survive on Government supports. Since the employment wage subsidy scheme, EWSS, and Government supports were removed a lot of companies tried to make a go of it but now with high energy prices and falling consumer confidence some companies will not survive. That is the truth, unfortunately. On the plus side, that situation will free up staff and custom for other businesses. Nobody likes to see any business fail but the nature of a market economy is that some businesses succeed while others do not and those that fail often get replaced by new ones that are better. We anticipate an increase in company insolvencies over the next few months. Crucially, we now have the small company administrative rescue process, SCARP. That is a really good system as it allows small companies to restructure where they can be made viable. So far a very small number of companies have availed of SCARP but the feedback is very positive. The fear of SCARP has caused debtors, banks and others to write down debts in a way that they would not have done previously but SCARP does help. We want to save businesses that are viable but we cannot continue to provide taxpayers' money to businesses that are not viable as that does not help anybody in the end.

On uptake of the 20 schemes, we need to advertise them more. We have the climate toolkit. We did think of making access to TBESS conditional on completing the climate toolkit to force businesses to become aware of what is on offer but we did not want to make it overly bureaucratic and force businesses, particularly small ones, to jump through too many hoops. When the documentation goes out businesses will be reminded that these schemes exist and that there is a climate toolkit that they can complete.

The Deputy was right to say that the cap is €10,000 per month per business unit. We wanted to include a cap because no cap would be impossible to cost and economically reckless.

We would welcome a trade focus from the committee. If the committee decides to do so then we would definitely like to get IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland to engage with the committee on that. I was a member of this committee between 2007 and 2011 so I know that at that time the committee had a particular interest in the number of trade visits. Such trade visits proved useful from a Team Ireland point of view and we are interested in talking to the committee about doing that again if they so desired.