Richard Bruton (Dublin Bay North, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

Given my time constraint, the Minister might be able to respond in writing.

First, I congratulate the Minister, his Department and the agencies on the progress they have made. In 2011, IDA companies were employing less than half the figure they are employing today. That is extraordinary progress. I refer also to Enterprise Ireland, where we have gone from 320,000 jobs to 560,000, which is really an extraordinary success. It would be appropriate to congratulate Julie Sinnamon and Terence O'Rourke, who were the two key people for much of that time. Frank Ryan and Martin Shanahan were also key players in those agencies. They did extraordinary work. I would describe it as patriotic, given the context of the situation in which we found ourselves.

Second, there is a sense out there among low-margin, high-employment businesses - particularly those that do not have the opportunity to engage in remote working and are customer-facing - that cost pressures are excessive at the moment. We need to think more creatively than just raising the issue of VAT rates. Perhaps this might be a matter of lower rates of PRSI for some companies that are in low-margin, high-employment sectors. That has been a feature of the PRSI system in the past. It seems to me that a different kind of business environment is emerging. It is hard to recruit in these sectors because they are always customer-facing and they are less attractive. I absolutely agree that we need to protect those employments. Covid showed that many of them were not adequately protected. The responses to that through changing the living wage, sick pay, etc. are absolutely right for the sectors. Yet, there is an issue of adaptation that needs to be considered. Representatives from the Low Pay Commission were before the committee and it certainly seemed that they envisaged that the Government will be looking at some of the pressure points that this will create.

While the rates concession is welcome, there may be a remaining issue.

Having come from years in opposition looking at Estimates, I would ask the Minister to consider the 75 indicators of outputs and outcomes. It seems that they are no longer appropriate to the sorts of challenge we face. Indeed, many of them forecast outcomes by agencies declining compared to their existing levels of achievement. More importantly, there are no sustainability measures. Sustainability will be key to competitiveness, as we have heard from the Minister’s own agencies. There is a very low rate of uptake of green initiatives by the enterprise stable. The number of high-potential start-ups is not an adequate measure of how good we are at starting up businesses and ensuring they are competitive and relevant. We need to be a little more forensic. Quite an amount of effort will go into producing the 75 indicators, but if they are not the right ones, much of that effort will be wasted. Other Departments are the same. They churn out these indicators without giving them any real thought and the indicators are not assisting us in deciding whether the Estimates and allocations are optimal.

An issue arose during the week at the climate committee, with it being EirGrid’s view that large energy users being unable to get connections was unsustainable. There has been a significant focus on data centres as the villains of the piece, but we are in a limbo whereby, even though electricity demand is only growing by 2.5% per annum, we are effectively telling potential players in the digital world that Ireland is not a good place to come because they cannot get connections. We need to sort ourselves out in this regard. We have pressures on our energy supply. From EirGrid’s analysis, that essentially has to do with the failure of the market mechanism to generate successful auctions. We are not paying enough for some of the gas standby capacity to come on stream. If the consequence of that is us undermining some key elements of our enterprise strategy, then it is a mistake. The Minister rightly pointed to offshore as presenting a significant opportunity, but the most efficient use of our offshore assets will be for domestic-based enterprises, not attempts to convert it into hydrogen or something else for export. We need to get our ducks in a row on this.

My final point concerns a recurring theme that I always raise with the Minister. His Department takes an exceptionally narrow view of what climate responsibility represents. The Department essentially only looks at the cement industry and one or two other tiny sectors in terms of what the enterprise sector contributes to the climate challenge. The reality is that we need a sustainability strategy for the key sectors, those being, food and construction, as the Minister rightly stated, as well as many others. The concept of enterprise not sitting at the table and trying to drive the sustainability agenda in a much more focused way is a missed opportunity. We need to pull together the entire supply chain in food and construction in particular, as they are the top two sectors with a negative impact on our carbon emissions through food waste, the way in which we produce food and so on. We need to get all of the players around the table instead of pointing fingers, especially at the farming sector. It is interesting that people are now discussing how we need sustainable agriculture and resilient food as a climate adaptation strategy. Rather than pointing fingers at farmers, we should be creating an environment in which they get paid for quality, low-impact food production. They do not currently, and we do not yet have the necessary instruments in place. We need a bigger tent around sectors like construction and food, which pose the main sustainability challenges for us as a country. The Minister’s Department must be more strategic. If I table a parliamentary question, I will be told that construction is for the Department of housing and that industry’s responsibility for carbon is solely the tiny percentage of emissions that come from cement and small elements of manufacturing. This might have been a bit of a rant, but we need to think more imaginatively and across silos more if we are to get some of these strategies in place.

My apologies, as I have to leave at 11.20 a.m. It was worth waiting to say a few words.