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

This kind of falls between my Department and the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. On my side, we are reviewing our schemes with a view to consolidating them. We have some very good schemes such as the employment wage subsidy scheme, EWSS, which helps with payroll, the Covid restrictions support scheme, CRSS, which helps with the fixed costs of running a premises if it has been closed, low cost loans, reduced VAT rates, and so on. In my Department, we are looking in particular at whether we need a new scheme for those businesses that have a premises but do not qualify for the CRSS because they are not open to the public and therefore were never closed to the public but whose trade is down 75% or 80% nonetheless. We are working on a scheme for them. I know the Minister, Deputy Catherine Martin, has quite a lot in her budget for this year and plans to develop those schemes in January and February.

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