Ms Bernie Connolly:

Regarding overall supports, I think Mr. Mooney-Brown mentioned that social enterprise and the circular economy is poorly understood. In a way, we are trying to shoehorn social enterprise into an existing private sector environment. One of the things we found when we had the mattress recycling project and even in the Cork urban soil project now is that many of the supports and soft supports available to private enterprise, such as setting up a website or getting an innovation voucher, are not available to social enterprises. There is a suite of things that could be done as well as the core funding, in addition to more robust and better-paid job activation programmes.

There are pieces of the legislation that are tricky in getting things off the ground. I refer to the waste management legislation. For example, community composting is in the climate action programme. Many groups are trying to do that now. There is kind of an anomaly there where they do not know whether they need to get a permit from the local authority, whether they can get an exemption, and there is licensing through the EPA for bigger facilities as well. We have not adjusted some of our legislation framework to suit social enterprise, and that is urgently needed.