Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Fifteen thousand businesses are getting the €5,000. The others, which is the largest cohort of SMEs paying less than €10,000 in rates, will get half of what they paid last year back in a grant this year. We had to try to put a mechanism in place that made a reasonable link between the size and scale of the business and how much we should be paying it in a grant towards the cost of running that business.

We thought that rates, although not perfect, were a reasonably good way of making that assessment. Generally, the more rates that are paid and the bigger the business is, the more people it employs. The larger its premises, the larger the cost increases linked to all of that. It is not a perfect way of doing it, but it does allow us to get a lot of money to a large number of businesses quickly and without a lot of bureaucracy and form-filling, which is what businesses asked us for.