Mr. Duncan Graham:

I will pick up those three points Deputy Bruton made and then I will ask Mr. Rogers to elaborate and give his thoughts. In terms of shared ground and what the Government could do, things like the online retail scheme, as I said, have been extremely well supported. The reality is that they have been oversubscribed in most cases. Last year €11 million was allocated for the scheme, but in the end €12 million was actually granted to businesses to help them develop. There has only been €5 million allocated this time around, and there is no current view that there is going to be any more money allocated to that scheme during the latter part of this year. We need to make sure that there is money to enable businesses to trade online as well as physically. We will end up with a retail industry that has both physical shops and online support. That is going to happen.

The reality is that we will also require less retail space in towns and cities going forward. One way to rejuvenate towns and cities is to bring more people back to live over the shop, if you like. This has been talked about quite a bit before but there seem to be some onerous planning restrictions that make that quite difficult at times. Going forward, I do not see a situation where retailers will have stock rooms on first and second floor levels in town centres. That could easily be used for housing. Increasingly, we will see retailers servicing both shops and online from edge of town locations. That sort of support would be important.

The other things that are happening, and where some of the big costs are coming through for retailers, and will continue to come through over the next few months and years, relate to Brexit and importing products. Much work has been done in terms of supply chains to ensure that rather than using the land bridge, businesses are now starting to import and use suppliers direct from northern Europe and beyond. We are very conscious that that has brought a cost.