Dr. Dermot Coates:

I thank Deputy for his question. In March last, the Department, in conjunction with the Department of Social Protection, published a report on the cost of doing business in Ireland. That was done following a direction from the Government last year. As part of the methodology for that, we conducted workshops with businesses, which included small businesses, hotels, restaurants, coffee shops, etc., and also case studies where we went out, met firms and went through the details of the issues they faced. I can re-circulate a copy of the report and a note on the key findings. There are a variety of issues buffering businesses, particularly smaller businesses. They include staff recruitment and retention, the expansion of the retail sector, in particular to provincial Ireland, which puts pressure on firms, and rising energy costs and interest rates. Firms being required to purchase housing has increasingly become an issue. Much of the feedback, as reflected in the report, is around the difficulty firms are having trying to grapple with multiple issues at one time. As regards capacity, as I informed Senator Garvey earlier, someone in a company may be a van driver, a stock manager, etc. There is that confluence of different issues but it is fair to say that the Department spent a lot of time doing that work to try to document exactly for policymakers the types of issues that micro and small businesses face, as opposed to talking about medium-sized businesses, which, in an Irish context, are very large firms and have much more market power to control their own costs.