Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I thank the ICTU and IBEC for coming in. I want to focus on something has not come up yet and falls between two stools. There are 309,000 SMEs, 281,000 microbusinesses that have between nought and nine employees. I have deep concerns about them falling between everybody else's motivations and focus. There are workers who are owners. Generally in Ireland and in this committee, we seem to have a narrative that there are the workers and the employers and they are somehow polarised. That does not serve any of the small microbusinesses to which I refer because many small businesses are the workers. We have to look at them and realise their importance. They probably have about 1 million of the jobs. Where I come from in County Clare, 70% of jobs are micro businesses. They are the backbone of our towns and villages that are not dying a death. I would love to see much more discussion through ICTU and IBEC around what we are doing for small businesses. Recently, many of them have been closing down for different reasons, with the new minimum wage coming in. Nobody opposes the need to increase the minimum wage but I do not hear IBEC or ICTU or anybody fighting for some other supports to keep these small worker-led businesses open. Everybody wants to pay the minimum wage. I have friends who have small businesses. Nobody denies the fact that we need to raise the minimum wage but we need to look at the nuance there between multinationals making huge profits, for example, and a small business with tight margins that probably will close because of the increase in minimum wage if we do not give it supports.

I would love to see collective bargaining being used to support small businesses dealing with this minimum wage increase. I do not hear ICTU talking about that at all. Also, with IBEC, building a better, sustainable future, supporting and delivering for business success is really good. However, has IBEC been talking to The Irish SME Association, ISME or the local enterprise offices, LEOs? We had them in here before us. I do not see anybody taking care of small businesses. The LEOs do some work but only for businesses that export, which many small businesses are not going to do. The Green for Micro initiative is happening but its targets are low. Huge numbers of small businesses have ridiculous costs and struggle, even with funding in place that we got through various ministers. Over the past three years I got funding for Green for Micro and other grants but small business do not know about these. LEOs are busy running such things as social media workshops. How is IBEC getting on with ISME and small firms associations? It has been in the news recently. I foresaw it in September when I met the Minister, Deputy Simon Coveney, who tried to give me a list of things we need to do to try to keep small businesses open. I do not know whose job it is. It seems to be everybody's job and nobody's job to protect small businesses.

In regard to workers' rights, for all those workers who work in small businesses, part of their rights is that we keep those businesses open, instead of being polarising and saying, "We have to increase minimum wage for the poor workers". Many of those workers in small places, for example, where I come from, are the employers as well. We have to get more nuanced about this if we want to protect small businesses.

If we are talking about climate resilience or sustainable futures, small businesses are where it is at because big businesses fall apart, their goods get stuck in the Red Sea because of war. The reality is that we are going to be downsizing and looking more to what we can get locally, within our country. We saw what happened with Brexit, with Ukraine and we now see what is happening with the war in the Red Sea. We should be championing the smallest businesses. They are the most reliable. They will not shut down and relocate to India or China. I have seen this happen in County Clare. We lost hundreds of jobs to big business, but it has always been about the big guys for many of our State agencies and even the unions. The small businesses are getting lost in it all. What do IBEC and ICTU think is most the important issue? While we discuss minimum wage and collective bargaining, what are we doing to take the huge threats facing small businesses seriously? We have all foreseen it. Every discussion has to include small businesses. It is not about the workers versus the employer necessarily, especially not in small businesses.