Cathal Crowe (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

In less than 90 days, the UK will be outside the EU Single Market and customs union. While the work of Government and the Union to salvage a Brexit deal continues, the message for businesses here at home continues to be to get Covid ready. Unfortunately for small and medium-sized businesses scattered throughout the country, Brexit and Covid are aligning as a perfect storm and bringing all the stresses and calamities associated with that.

Earlier this week I met some small business owners and tourism providers in west Clare. They told me that the pillar banks still insist on negotiating interest rates and repayment terms of existing loans when cash-strapped business owners approach them for Government- and EU-backed capital. This is fundamentally wrong and entirely contrary to the Government's July stimulus. Small and microfinance loans provided by Government must always be considered to be in a separate purse from other loans that the banks generally provide.

In Clare and the wider mid-west, our regional economy lives and dies by Shannon Airport. I welcome the news that the Government plans to adopt EU-wide flight protocols next week, but this needs to be more than just giving a political thumbs-up to the protocols, it needs to be backed in meaningful ways at the point of departure and arrival. I was concerned that at today's meeting of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Transport and Communications Networks, the Minister for Transport suggested it may take some time to implement the traffic light system of enforcement measures. We do not have time to dither on this. The aviation sector, especially Shannon Airport in my county, is on its knees. It is essential that we move with full expediency and urgency.

I refer to road haulage. As I drove to Dublin this morning, I noticed at Kill, County Kildare a tailback about 4 km or 5 km long on the opposite side of the motorway with all three lanes fully backlogged with traffic. This tailback was as a result of a Garda Covid checkpoint. Where these Covid checkpoints are set up, we need a fast-track facility for haulage trucks that are hard pressed on time to negotiate their way across Ireland to ferry ports and onwards to Britain and continental Europe.

Deputy Murnane O'Connor mentioned farming. Like many Members, I have been briefed and pressed by the IFA in my county in the past week. This is the winter they fear most. Yesterday I was out in my old clothes helping a friend with cattle testing of weanlings that will hopefully be sold at mart in Sixmilebridge next week. Farmers such as him, who are so reliant on the beef sector, which is turbulent in the best of years, need next week's budget to be a good budget for farming so that they can approach the next few months of uncertainty buoyed up in the knowledge that the Government has their back.

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