Michael Fitzmaurice (Roscommon-Galway, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the measures such as the start-up grant, the rates initiative, the Covid payment and the VAT reduction. There is a lot of talk around the loan system and the credit guarantee, but many businesses are very afraid to move at the moment because they do not know what the future is.

Most food products, and indeed most products, are shifted with pallets. One sector has come out today to indicate that Ireland will soon be without pallets and this is because the previous Government and this Government have not tackled a problem in the forestry sector. People will wake up when they see they have no timber pallets on which to put food products. This is coming down the road very fast and then there will be a big hullabaloo. I believe that certain people within the Department have not dealt with it and, to be quite frank, no Minister has cracked the whip to get it sorted out. That is the problem.

There is also a situation with the bus companies. Firstly, drivers have left them and the operators are struggling to get drivers. The bus operators must pay insurance and perhaps rent a building where the vehicles can be kept or fixed. There are overhead costs. I am aware that there are start-up grants and this, that and the other but at the end of the day operators running fleets of buses will go bust shortly if they do not get back on the road or if some initiative is not put in place.

Footfall in the larger cities has fallen by quite a lot. I spoke with a hairdresser in Galway city who employs a good few people. While the first three weeks were great there was a fall off straightaway. If we do not keep some of these businesses on life support we will lose them down the road.

There is one thing that should be done and I ask the Minister of State to ask the Minister for Agriculture, Food and the Marine about it. Consider the people who kept food on the table, the farming communities, those who got up every morning and the hauliers who kept bringing the milk, beef and all food produce around the country. Farmers who exported cattle that were fit for slaughter have been left out of the beef finisher scheme. These are the forgotten people in all of this.

Knock airport is vital to the west of Ireland. We need to make sure we target and give enough funding for the life support to keep businesses going. If we do not do so, whether people like it or not, there will be a lot of redundancies. On top of that would be more taxes for working class people because the Government would need more money. We will not keep on borrowing for the next four or five years, let no-one go codding themselves. We need to put the incentives there for the people who are employing people, and also for entrepreneurs to get them out and moving and employing people. That is how we will generate an economy.

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