Joe Flaherty (Longford-Westmeath, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The country is tired and weary as it looks to get past Covid. There is no doubt that the crisis has utterly transformed much of everyday life in Ireland. I am conscious and deeply appreciative that a range of supports have been put in place to support businesses throughout the lockdown and that, in the main, they are proving very effective. The reality, however, is that many businesses simply will not reopen and simply will not be able to function in a post-Covid era because, to smash a famous line of poetry, all has changed, utterly changed.

I will focus briefly on a sector I hold very dear, the regional press, because it is where I pursued my career of choice for most of my life. Sadly, Covid has fast-tracked the demise of the sector by a generation. Young people now, my own children included, will simply will never purchase a local newspaper. The old income model involving 80% advertisement and 20% newspaper sales is broken, and some of the titles that were founded in reaction to an imperialist presence in our country more than 100 years ago now face a perilous and uncertain future. At the heart of these newspapers are the staff. Many are friends of mine and many are sons and daughters of parents who devoted their lives to the industry. There is ink in their veins, yet these are the same people who enthusiastically embraced the online revolution and have done everything asked of them by their employers to safeguard a vital community resource. I appreciate it is not the Minister's remit. The Future of Media Commission has been formed but, sadly, its formation gave little recognition to the regional press. An urgent suite of supports is needed for the sector because we must rally behind the staff, many of whom have been laid off temporarily in recent days and now rightly wonder whether there is a future at all for a business and profession to which they are wholeheartedly dedicated.

Our local newspapers are just a snapshot of a wider issue, namely the sweeping changes that have ripped through rural Ireland as a result of Covid-19. The unrelenting conversion to online shopping and the suspension, through restrictions, of click-and-collect services have been the death knell for so many of our small traders and retailers. These are the very lifeblood of our small towns and villages.

We have a suite of Covid supports but the focus now needs to be on the supports that will be critical to getting businesses back open and that will help them through what will be a period of great uncertainty. We have learned many lessons over the past year and many of them have been hard lessons. We have learned what was needed to sustain these businesses through a prolonged period of closure. Now we need to know that the focus will start to switch to reviving, sustaining and revitalising them, whether it is the local newspaper, the village shop or the bar on the corner.

We passed a sad milestone yesterday, with 3,000 deaths as a result of Covid. As Government and as legislators, we now need to work on the support packages to ensure we will not be tracking the number of businesses who fail to reopen or cannot reopen later this year.

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