Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will wait for the Minister or State to come back to me on this but to my knowledge, it was never discussed.

I have the privilege of being the Chair of the Comhchoiste na Gaeilge, na Gaeltachta agus na nOileán. Yesterday we had a very good briefing from the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, Deputy Coveney, on the omnibus Brexit legislation that will go through the Dáil in a record amount of time. We cannot put through Bille na dteangacha oifigiúla or even minimal legislation to make it easier for co-operatives on the ground but we can push through an enormous amount of Brexit legislation in a short number of weeks.

Interestingly, provision is being made for Enterprise Ireland. The legislation will be changed to facilitate all sorts of companies and to make things easier for them, with extra money being made available with no limits, changes with regard to research and development and money being paid up front. All of those changes can be made very quickly and perhaps rightly so, but I have not yet had a chance to go through it all in detail. The point is that they can be made very quickly without any problems and yet there is a big problem with regard to co-operatives, despite the overwhelming evidence on the ground, across Europe and elsewhere, of their importance. This is also despite the evidence from the Government's own documents which emphasise the importance of the co-operative movement, including the Forfás report on social enterprise in Ireland which was published in 2013 and the Government's White Paper on Ireland's transition to a low carbon future, among other policy documents. Both of the aforementioned documents identify the co-operative model as being core to developing community-based enterprises in each sector. What happened as a result of that? Not too much-----

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