Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is a twofold system. All of the supports, encouragement and financial assistance to help people to establish their own businesses are available form the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation. They are growing, and given that more people have started to establish their own businesses, we can see that confidence is returning. However, Deputy Fitzpatrick is right. In our Department, which is concerned with income support, we want to fill the gap so that a self-employed person who is ill can avail of the security blanket of the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. I am not in a position to tell the Deputy when this gap will be closed. If I won the lotto tomorrow, we might do it much sooner than we will be able to. It is very much dependent on the growth in the economy. The economy is in a good place at the moment and if those trajectories keep going in the right direction, I anticipate that we will be able to do it within the lifetime of this Government, assuming that we have a full term. However, we are not going to stop until we extend to the self-employed community the full spectrum of supports that are available from my Department, whether they are treatment benefits or any of the schemes that are available to employees.

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