Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 8 November 2023
Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation
Skills and Supports Required for Businesses to Meet Decarbonisation Targets: Discussion
Mr. Paul Healy:
We do. Within our scope and our model, we are engaging with clusters of businesses. That generally involves a company, whether large or small, that has a relationship with an organisational body with a cluster of some kind. However, many firms, particularly locally trading firms, do not have such a relationship. The challenge is reaching those small business owners, getting them to start thinking about engaging and training their staff to be more productive and more competitive and to give career choice and options to their employees and bringing them into the range of supports that are available throughout the whole ecosystem, not just through ourselves, but through other bodies. That is a challenge. How are we addressing that? We are trying to form new clusters and we are bringing in new networks as often as we can. We have regular promotion and social media and national media campaigns to encourage that cohort of companies that are not engaging on this agenda. To go back to something I said earlier, there is a consistency in the barriers we hear about. There are issues with time poverty, cost burdens on smaller firms in particular and the challenge Senator Garvey cogently expressed regarding the complexity in the system and knowing where to start and where to end as the owner of a small firm. That is a challenge we are certainly facing. Within our mandate and our resources, we are trying to grow the number of companies engaging with us and, through that, the number of employees. Ms Donnery might want to add to that.
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