Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am from a construction and farming background. Some people who want to return to work in the construction industry cannot do so because of issues with the Safe Pass scheme. For anybody who does not know, construction workers must have a Safe Pass card, which requires doing a one-day course where they sit down in front of an instructor who teaches them about different safety measures. At the end of it, they do a small examination which involves answering roughly 20 questions. It is a tick-box exercise for people in construction. I am inundated with people asking about this. The Government has said that construction industry workers are allowed to go back to work, but many of them cannot do so because they are waiting for their Safe Pass cards. For 360 teleporter drivers or any other type of machine driver, their employer must sign a form to say they have worked in the construction industry driving machines for the employer and have X number of years' experience doing it. The worker's ticket is then extended for another number of years.

We see here in this House how we can talk to the Minister on screen. There is no reason that the people running the Safe Pass scheme cannot talk to construction workers on screen from the comfort of their own homes.

We are even saving carbon tax by letting them stay at home to do the examination. We are saving emissions. They can do it through Zoom. They can complete their forms and have a secure website to answer the 20 questions that are required of them afterwards. They do not need to go into a place where they must maintain a social distance. For the period until the lockdown is over and to deal with the backlog, we need people to do the same as we are doing here in the Dáil. Let them do all these tests online. Let them fill out the forms online and let them go back to work. If somebody does not pass, the person can re-apply and do it a second time. It can be done online and we can get people back to work. It will also save some of the €350 Covid weekly payments these people are receiving. They want to go back to work. They are able to return and maintain a social distance in work. We can save this money with a little commonsense. I am asking for the Minister's help. She should introduce this and let people return to work if they wish to do so by using the media we have today to help them do it.

A number of measures have been introduced to help small businesses. I have figures from the 2019 small business recovery plan. The chairperson of the group is John Moran. The Government should acknowledge this group of SMEs. SMEs account for 1.5 million employees and for 65% of all employees. Some 93.6% of the total number of persons employed are in Irish-owned SMEs. The SME contribution to exports is 31%. TaxAssist Accountants for the SMEs say the SMEs are not interested in taking on new debt. They are happy to break even this year if they can hold onto their employees. The French approach to this was to ask SMEs what their turnover was for last year. I will give the example of €100,000. The French gave them three months of the last year's turnover to get the small and medium sized businesses back up and running. In Ireland, the application is through the bank, which will give somebody €5,000 to €50,000 with no interest or repayment for six months and a rate of 4.25% thereafter. This is worse than what the troika wanted from Ireland after the crash. A number of SMEs are disillusioned. They are finding it very hard to motivate themselves to start up again. We must encourage this sector before it is too late.

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