Feargal Quinn (Independent)
Link to this: Individually | In context | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister who seems to be getting very fond of us and is coming before the committee on a regular basis.

I am concerned about subsidiarity. It seems to me that more and more power is going to the centre of Europe rather than being delegated outwards. I wonder to what extent we are very good Europeans compared to others. A lot of the regulations that are made - not just European regulations - apply to small companies as well as large ones. There is a suggestion that far fewer regulations should apply to start-up companies that have fewer than ten employees. In the case of France, for example, a number of regulations do not apply to companies until they have 50 employees. It could be argued that this discourages companies from taking on their 51st employee and therefore growing but it appears that many of the European regulations could also be limited to larger companies. I would like to see that issue advanced but I do not know to what extent it is possible to achieve it, with a form of subsidiarity.

Some countries have a regulation which provides that if a new regulation is introduced for a small business, some previous regulation must be dropped. In other words, they operate an "in and out" process, so as not to have a surfeit of regulations that will inhibit a company from growing, inhibit start-ups or inhibit SMEs from developing business. Would it be possible for us to argue in Europe that many of these regulations should not apply to small businesses?