Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The CRSS will benefit some in live entertainment and music and that is to be welcomed. The report itself, however, obviously influenced by the campaigning of groups like the Events Industry Alliance and the Event Production Industry Covid-19 Working Group, EPIC, points out that huge numbers of SMEs in the music and live entertainment sector will not qualify for the CRSS because they do not have rateable or public-facing premises and so on. This, by the way, is the same point I have made about taxi drivers. They are excluded from these supports and, in fact, they are probably the people who need the most. It is all very well announcing schemes and having positive proposals from a task force but if they are not implemented it will not mean a hell of a lot to the people who are really on their knees. More widely, it is worrying that there is, from what I can see, no timeline for the universal basic income pilot and in a number of other areas, it seems we are going to follow a task force report with an oversight committee. When is it actually going to happen because it is urgent?

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