John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail)

I welcome the action plan. I was particularly pleased to hear the Minister say that this area will receive relentless attention. I acknowledge that much of the report relates to activity rather than action that will be taken today. The Government has effectively abolished the county enterprise boards. During an earlier debate, the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, asked Deputies not to come to the House without offering solutions. He was perfectly right to say that. I admired the Minister, Deputy Bruton, when he took a similar stance in opposition. It is on the record that when I was a Minister of State, I commented on the contribution that was being made by Deputy Bruton. However, I have to say that since he was appointed as Minister for Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation, very little of the action he promised when he was in opposition has been delivered on in Government. Dumbing down the county enterprise boards and merging them with county councils will not do the business for the Government. They are being merged with entities which have outsourced to the private sector the only profitable area of their operations, waste collection, because they have been unable to make money out of it. Local authorities cannot even make a profit from housing where they have a captive audience. Instead, they are proposing to outsource rent collection and local authority housing or transfer responsibility for this function to a single agency.

Local authorities do not have the commercial mindset required to understand the needs of the small and medium business sector in local communities. The county enterprise boards have created many jobs through small businesses and have acquired a reputation for doing business in local communities. The Government's decision to dismantle the boards is a retrograde step which should be revisited.

What are the various Ministers in the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation doing? With responsibility for the county enterprise boards having been transferred to the Minister for the Environment, Community and Local Government and the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade assuming responsibility for Enterprise Ireland and trade missions, the Department has been left with little else to do other than engage in rhetoric. That will not solve the problems of today.

My party in government promised the small and medium enterprise sector money through the banks. The Government did not learn from the failure of the banks to deliver on this promise and it does not have a game plan for solving the problem. Why does it not use the country enterprise boards to fund credit unions, as is being done on a voluntary basis, and allow them to provide soft repayable loans to small businesses? The banks are not lending money and are doing a disservice to the economy. Regardless of what steps the Government takes, businesses will not function without capital. The banks will not provide them with the money they need. The statistics the banks provide the Government are false. If a bank restructures an overdraft, it records this transaction as a new credit line, as the Minister of State, Deputy Perry, must know from his background in business. The Government must understand this issue if it is to tackle the problem.

The Government argues we must expand trade with the BRIC countries - Brazil, Russia, India and China - and claims to have an Asian strategy. Under what part of this strategy did it close down the representative office in Taiwan, which costs €50,000 per annum? Why did it close an office which allowed Irish companies to avail of trade agreements between Taiwan and China to protect their entities that are trading with China? I have made submissions to the Taoiseach and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade requesting that they reverse this decision immediately.

I ask the Minister to bring the company consolidation legislation, which brings together in one Bill the 1,300 sections of 15 different companies Acts, before the Committee on Jobs, Social Protection and Education. The enactment of such legislation would speak volumes to indigenous businesses and indicate to those who wish to invest in this country that we have in place modern legislation which they can understand.

I hope the Minister will make further arrangements to have the House discuss small business in much greater detail than it is doing today. I ask him to follow his beliefs on the legislation governing joint labour committees, which he knows will not work for the 20,000 businesses that create 200,000 jobs locally. I ask him to return to the position he held while in opposition and follow his own beliefs.

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