Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 30 November 2022

Select Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Estimates for Public Services 2022
Vote 32 - Enterprise, Trade and Employment (Supplementary)

Photo of Damien EnglishDamien English (Meath West, Fine Gael)
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From what I can see, most companies are within the rules. I do not have the list of them all in front of me. When we last had this conversation a few weeks ago, however, most schemes had. Again, the question is how to reach the majority of businesses more quickly. We think the TBESS is a very beneficial scheme that will reach potentially hundreds of thousands of businesses in a quick way with a cash support. There are other supports there, and we will touch on the loan guarantee again later. That is another important support. As for this scheme, we are using the maximum. We will monitor the schemes and keep an eye on them to see if we can improve them, but it should be borne in mind that most of the supports that are sanctioned under the framework are out of our own budget, taxpayers' money. There will be redistribution of funds with the windfall tax and so on into the new year, but we do not have an exact amount for that yet. As it stands, therefore, we have to try to balance our own budget while using the framework to have these schemes in place.