James Lawless (Kildare North, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I take this opportunity to speak to the Microenterprise Loan Fund (Amendment) Bill, the debate on which, I understand, is due to conclude today. I am glad to support this Bill and I commend it to the House. I want to take a moment to recognise the new surroundings and the amphitheatre in which we find ourselves. I pay tribute to the Ceann Comhairle and the Oireachtas staff who are behind this great new venture on which we find ourselves embarking. If I ever imagined myself addressing such an auditorium, I thought I might have a somewhat larger audience in attendance, but such are the slings and arrows. Here we are and at least we can get on with our business, as we are doing today.

This Bill is one of the many vital items of legislation being addressed and introduced by the new Government. It highlights why we needed that Government. While it was of essence that we put a Government in place after the long hiatus of talks and the pandemic, the political fates that were aligning made it all the more imperative that we get a Government in order that this type of Bill could get into the Chamber and be passed.

I wish the new Government well. It is important to note that the Government, despite some claims to the contrary at the outset, enjoys a solid majority. I know that there were upwards of 30 Deputies in excess of a majority on the day that the Taoiseach, Deputy Micheál Martin, was appointed. I think that by any metric, whether votes, seats or percentages, the Government enjoys an overwhelming mathematical majority of the House, electorate, public support, etc. It is important that that is the case and that we all get on with the job of supporting that Government and its important work and measures to tackle matters such as this. This is one of many priority items that it was so important to introduce.

I pay tribute to the resilience of so many small businesses in our towns, villages and constituencies that have somehow survived. It is still an open question as to whether some will survive. I pay tribute to those that have got to this point in the pandemic. In many cases, they reinvented themselves successfully and ingeniously in various ways. I marvelled at the rapid response in my constituency, which was mirrored across the country. We had a unique situation at the height of the lockdown whereby individuals were cooped up in their own homes and private houses for weeks and months on end. At the same time, we had suppliers of goods and services, which were of great interest to those individuals, behind closed doors in depots, corner stores and everywhere else. It did not take a huge leap of faith or imagination to connect the two.

I was delighted that my colleague, the Minister of State, Deputy Troy, spearheaded writing to the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation to try to get the needed certainty that businesses could begin to trade online and to trade over the phone in remote fashion. That got going quite quickly in the end. An Post, delivery services and courier firms played a part in that online fulfilment too. It was remarkable to see the speed with which local retailers embraced it once it was clear that it was kosher to do so.

In my constituency, Ted Johnsons hardware in Naas, a popular family-run traditional business mobilised and it led to a situation where clerks, tellers and store staff were taking orders over the phone until lunchtime every morning, manning the phones in every sense, and then on the road in a van that afternoon to deliver their wares, which were highly in demand in the area. They fulfilled that need, keeping the company in business and the staff in jobs and meeting the needs relating to the supply chain. Businesses like that embraced this new remote world for the first time, tackling matters such as supply chains, logistics, filling orders and methods of payment, the nuts and bolts of remote delivery and large-scale supply chain management. In the time it took a Harvard business paper to come off the printer, the company had invented and reinvented it in its own storeroom. I pay tribute to businesses such as that to which I refer.

I talked about survival and this is a matter of survival for many businesses. I think Darwin said that it is not always the strongest or biggest that will survive, but those who are most adaptable to change. Our small retailers demonstrated and lived that value during the pandemic in the way in which they proved adaptable and changed, remodelling their own offerings. I pay tribute to them for doing that.

On a note of more caution and concern, while we embrace that, an online trading voucher has been talked about. Deputy Denis Naughten mentioned it earlier. This matter also came to my attention during the pandemic. The online trading voucher support scheme appears to have run dry. That is a matter of great concern to those concerns which have reinvented themselves and which are putting their shoulders to the wheel in order to serve their customers and keep their businesses afloat and their staff in jobs. The trading voucher scheme enables businesses to get online and provides access to support, mentoring and finance. I appeal to the Ministers and to anybody else with power in this area to examine the position. We cannot say to businesses at the height of this pandemic, when everybody is embracing remote distribution channels, that last year's allocation is used up and that they will have to wait until next year. I do not think that is good enough. I hope, expect and am confident that this matter will be tackled.

On the bricks and mortar and the people who cannot do business online, we are all very familiar with online Zoom calls, Skype chats and everything else. A lot of business and socialising is being done that way. In the normal way we would now be embarking on the summer school season. That along with conferences and other get-togethers are now transitioning to online, which is great in the sense that it continues and prevails, and those discussions take place. However, it is not such great news for the coffee shops, pubs, restaurants and hotels that supported those events. People cannot buy a cup of coffee on a Zoom call and they cannot go and have their meals with other delegates coming out of an online conference. That is a concern right across the country.

We have seen considerable focus on staycations and people going down the country. I applaud that and people should do that. Let us not forget Dublin and the commuter belt and our day-to-day businesses. A local example is the Petit Café across the road from Leinster House. I spoke to the manager yesterday who is having terrible trouble because the footfall that normally generates in the city centre from the museums, galleries and public buildings, not to mention the commercial activity, is just not there. We need to find a way to put feet back on the street in a safe way and in a way that can support businesses allowing them to survive.

I pay tribute to the retailers. The supermarkets and convenience stores kept going through the pandemic. Those retailers and their staff put themselves literally on the front line. It is important to recognise those front-line workers as front-line heroes.

Kildare Chamber of Commerce, as with many business associations around the country, is concerned. The Bill offers a welcome channel of finance for small businesses. For anyone who wishes to avail of it, it will be lifeblood. It is not a panacea or a silver bullet, but it is a very useful and important measure. The Kildare Chamber of Commerce survey identified 10,000 active enterprises and 50,000 workers across the commercial, trade and professional services industries with an 88% employment rate prior to the emergency. Businesses are very concerned. Activity levels are extremely low. Less than half - that figure may be optimistic - of their usual activity was presenting. Earnings have dropped by more than 60%. Some 25% of businesses expect to have earnings of 70% less than normal, meaning a quarter of businesses will not even make 30% of their usual revenue. That decline has been felt most strongly in the regions, including in the east.

The smaller operators, which do not have the reserves, the ecosystem or the cashflow are seeing a significantly disproportionate impact. Those microenterprises, small businesses many of which are family run, need support. The Microenterprise Loan Fund (Amendment) Bill is part of the solution. I wish it well and I encourage everybody to apply for it and draw it down as a support for their businesses. I commend the Government on introducing it.

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