Mr. Padraig Broderick:

I thank the Chair. I have had a Spar supermarket in Croom town centre for the past 20 years. I employ 49 people, 20 of whom are full-time. Like most town centres in Ireland we suffer from a lot of dereliction and I am active in reviving Croom town centre, including my expansion of my own store in Croom during the past year and a half. I was able to borrow a significant amount of money on the strength of my business and purchase the closed Ulster Bank building beside me, and move in and offer new services and expand my business into this building. I was also able to house our local post office, which was about to close down due to the previous owners retiring. I have a really good vibrant business. We are an award-winning store for our day-to-day practice in the running of the business so I have a good grasp of retail and have been in retail since I was 15 years old. The big focus in my investment was energy-saving equipment. As retailers we are always very conscious that it is our next biggest bill, after wages.

I carried out an energy audit in February and the only piece of the jigsaw I was missing was solar so I borrowed €50,000 to put solar on my roof. At the time the grant was available. Within weeks of securing that loan, the grant was 90% available, then 50:50, then it disappeared but I was still hell-bent on putting solar on my roof. Then along came the unprecedented costs over the past six to nine months and that money has now gone into paying my increased electricity costs. For the next three years, I will be paying for solar that is not on my roof and trying to figure out how I actually got into this position after having a very vibrant business 12 months ago. From a vibrant business to paying for solar and not having solar and building up arrears with my energy supplier and building up arrears with my wholesaler, for the first time in 20 years, the future is not very bright for Padraig Broderick in Croom, who is very much part of Croom's town centre's revival.

I have a very viable business, be it in a very vulnerable position at present. We need Government support to weather the storm.

During the course of this meeting, I just got notification that Electric Ireland is increasing its prices from 1 December.