Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I join the Deputy in thanking and congratulating the staff in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council, and county councils throughout the country, for doing such a good job in processing all these applications. It was not a part of their normal work. They were asked to do it and it took a few weeks to get going, but they did it and they did it well. We rightly congratulate and thank healthcare worker and other essential and front-line workers for the work that they have done during this pandemic, but we should not forget the people behind the scenes in administrative jobs in offices, without whom nothing else would happen and without whom this money would not have gone out to those businesses. Some of those businesses might not have survived and people might have lost their jobs in the run-up to Christmas. I offer that shout-out to all those people who work in administration and management, whose work is also essential and who have made a big difference during the pandemic.

The Deputy asked about the number of applications and I do not have those figures here. I will send them to him by correspondence. In general, where applications were refused, it tended to be due to non-eligibility. I do not have the information for Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown specifically, but for the country, there were 55,000 restart grant applications, of which 46,000 were approved. There were 63,600 for restart grant plus, of which 56,300 were approved. Where they were not approved, it was generally because a company was not eligible.

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