Matt Shanahan (Waterford, Independent) | Oireachtas source

It needs to be acknowledged that we have two separate streams of business going on here. The Enterprise Ireland people will know that Enterprise Ireland is largely export-focused. A large number of the companies that would be engaged with Enterprise Ireland have very good market intelligence in terms of where they are going, and they would understand the benefits of sustainability and how they might market them, and they would also understand the benefits to the bottom line of putting that in. That is one side. To me, the small business sector is a different sector, and I know it reasonably well and have worked in it for a long time. To follow Deputy Bruton’s point, if the committee is to make recommendations regarding all of this, I would like to see us looking for a separate agency to manage the LEOs and the small business area.

One thing that strikes me from the discussion today is that it is about the bottom line for small businesses. When we talk about sustainability and all of that, there is generally a cost and unless a business can see a saving or a market advantage, it is very hard to convince the business to go for that. Maybe one of the things the LEO co-ordinators could look at is some kind of a sustainable quality trademark, whereby people would go through some process with the LEO. They could outline their business area and what they are doing, and the LEO could do some form of mini-audit and allow the businesses to represent themselves as being on that programme and communicate that to their customer base. That is probably the first thing.

Senator Garvey spoke about the urgency and we all feel the urgency, but it has to be driven by the markets. If the market is not demanding it, it is very hard to ask people to change their business, change what they are doing and add costs to their business if they cannot see it helping them to survive and stay profitable.