Róisín Garvey (Green Party)
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Seven minutes is never enough. I welcome the Minister and thank him for bringing his whole team with him. I cannot imagine how he gets his head around a whole Department in 13 weeks, so I will not be looking for plan Bs or plan As from him.

It is great we are at full employment in the country. It is something we have to acknowledge and be positive about. It is always easy being negative and saying what more we should be doing. It is great we are at a stage where there is full employment. If people want to work, there are jobs for them. It is very positive.

I will focus on smaller businesses, which are the backbone of where I come from in Clare. As enterprise, trade and employment spokesperson for the Green Party, I do not worry too much about the multinationals and their vast profits. I like to focus on the smaller business that are struggling a lot with profit margins.

The first issue I wish to raise is that local enterprise offices are doing great work in some things around digitalisation, going online, women in business and things like that. They are doing well in that regard but they are not doing so well on the green for micro stuff. Their targets are too low and they do not have the uptake we would like to see and need them to see. We need to look again at the green for micro. We have increased the fund. I got extra funding from the previous Minister to increase the grants linked to the green for micro. There was not a direct grant linked to it previously.

There are also issues around the companies that are listed that do these two-day audits for free. Some of them are on site for two days and do loads of work. Yesterday I talked to a woman who runs a café in Dublin. She had to send in all the photographs. Nobody is coming near her business. She has to do a load more work, send loads of photographs of everything and send loads of bills in. I know for a fact these companies are getting €2,500 each to do the two-day energy audit. We broke down the figures through the Department. Let us have standards. Let us see why we are not getting the uptake we should be getting. If done properly, this will make huge supports to help businesses cut down their electricity costs, replacing fridges and all that kind of stuff. We need to look at that.

With regard to small businesses, it is great we have done such great work in the Department around increasing minimum wage, time off, sick pay, paternity leave, maternity leave, mental health issues and menopause leave – all very positive things. However, for small businesses, it is a much bigger challenge than it is for big businesses with big profits. We also have an extra bank holiday, which is fantastic. However, from a small business perspective, those measures all cost the small businesses huge amounts.

As yet, we have not given them faith or hope that this is at all possible for them. It is something that is deeply worrying a lot of small business that have small profit margins. We need to look at the PRSI side of things. It is a worry because 70% of jobs in Ireland are in the SME sector. I know we get a lot of taxes from the multinationals but, at the end of the day, they could up and leave any time they want. The small businesses are invested in, support and work in our communities. I worry about small businesses and all the extra costs we have put on them, which were badly needed for fairness and better quality of life for employees, but we do need to look at what we will do with small businesses.

I am worried about scope 3. Small businesses are struggling to get the scope 3 stuff. I have been talking to many big businesses that try to get small employers and employees providing for them because that is part of their overall climate targets. In general, a lot of big companies are doing very well in that but they can afford a whole team of people to help bring down their costs and move away from the dependency on fossil fuel, plastics and things like that. However, they are struggling to get small businesses that have a clue what their carbon footprint is, which means small businesses are losing out. I want to know what we are doing about the scope 3 stuff. I believe there is a whole climate section in the Department. I do not know how we are looking. Is the Department engaging with businesses to ensure climate targets are progressing? We have this climate action Bill. How is it going? I know great work is being done on it but I do not know how it is looking. Has the Department contacted to the IDA, Enterprise Ireland and got them all in a room to discuss how our targets are working out and what more can be done to make sure we reach them?

Is there any plan to completely separate the local enterprise offices, LEOs, from local authorities? They vary hugely from county to county. Some of them are embedded in local authorities and will do whatever takes the fancy of the CEO of the council, while others are separated, committed and doing a great job. I see a huge variety in the way LEOs are working. We have invested huge money in them. We have also said they are now able to support businesses with up to 50 employees, whereas it used to be ten. What have we done to restructure the LEOs to make sure they are capable of doing this? Money and throwing money at grants is not always the solution. Sometimes we have to make sure it is being done right and spent well. I would like an update on that issue. Have we gone from nought to ten to nought to 50 and left everything the same?