Louise O'Reilly (Dublin Fingal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Yesterday evening, the Dáil discussed the Ukraine credit guarantee scheme. There was some annoyance following the Covid schemes, which have all closed now, although there is still some overhang, that some of the companies that had been in receipt of quite an amount of State support to keep going through the pandemic, which was entirely appropriate and which saved jobs, etc., paid dividends to shareholders and came through with huge profits. We are talking about new schemes that have been introduced and, recognising that Enterprise Ireland does not design these, I fear that the lessons that could have been learned from the previous schemes have not been learned. The Minister for Finance is on the record as saying that there is no way of preventing data centres from getting support in the context of energy, for instance. It is understandable how that does not sit well with people. Colleagues in other parties spoke about perhaps linking State aid to workers rights. That is not an approach I would favour, but nor do I favour the notion that the State would support companies where workers rights are not respected. When designing a scheme of support like we are looking at now, is there scope for some sort of checks and balances to be put in place to ensure that does not happen? It upset people to see companies that could have sustained a lot more than the smaller companies come through and pay dividends or report profits when a lot of smaller companies did not make it through Covid, notwithstanding the supports that were there.