Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

It is like the energy credit allocated to households. I did not need it but there are constituents of mine who needed triple the amount to allow them to manage. I was raising this all through last summer because of examples on the ground and cases I was working on myself. These included very energy-intensive manufacturing industries closing down because of the difficulties they were facing, or at least reducing their staff very substantially. In fact, existential threats were being placed on the businesses. There are other supports available outside the TBESS for those kinds of industries but I am not sure they are targeted in the right way. In any case, I thank our guests for their comments on the TBESS. I am attracted to the idea of including an employment threshold because there is a strong argument in any case for developing - I have bored successive Ministers for Finance to tears on this - a German-style Kurzarbeit scheme. We must do so if we are to maintain the levels of employment we have at the moment and ensure skill sets that are in danger of being lost, especially in manufacturing at present because of the high costs, are not lost. Those businesses need to be supported. The argument from the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment and others seems to be we are technically at full employment so if somebody loses their job tomorrow, he or she can maybe access another job next week. However, it will not be the same kind of job and once those skills are gone they are gone forever, so it is a decision about what kind of economic model we want and what kind of labour market model we want.

That leads me to the observation Mr. Talbot made earlier about doing things better and having better jobs. Mr. Brady is absolutely right that the evolution of the Irish labour market has been extraordinary over the last 30 years. I am glad he mentioned access to third level because the woman who introduced that wider access, Niamh Bhreathnach, passed away this week. That was a revolutionary decision and really pioneering. It ensured people from working and lower middle-class backgrounds could have the opportunity to get to university. The success of that intervention in terms of our economic model and how we have evolved since then has yet to be written.

Central to creating those better jobs and doing things better is the research and development piece. I am concerned, and have been for a number of years, about the productivity gap between the indigenous Irish enterprise sector and the multinational sector. Let us park research and development for a moment, as we are familiar with the arguments about the research and development tax credit and its efficacy for SMEs. This is a question for both Chambers Ireland and IBEC. I am trying to distil it down to a silver bullet, not that there is one. However, if our guests had the opportunity tomorrow to do something significant to ensure that the value chain was improved and that productivity levels and the productivity value of the SME sector grew and so on, what would it be? It should be something outside the research and development tax credit because we know investment in research and development leads to greater productivity, higher-value jobs and so on. We do not have that significant Mittelstandsector that is very productive. By the way, this is the trick with respect to our regional economies. Google, Facebook and large pharma companies are not going to move to certain areas of the country, so it should be our ambition to ensure certain regions of the country specialise in certain areas. That then involves our institutes of technology, our universities, our local enterprise offices, Enterprise Ireland regional offices and so on. It should be our ambition that we are encouraging indigenous firms to develop, expand and scale up in towns in the regions so they become significant employers and then support the wider local economy. We know the multiplier there is huge. It is a long-winded question but is there something we are not doing at the moment that, if we look under the bonnet, could make the engine run better?