Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I was not going to speak on this Bill, although my office has done great work on it. I read it because it is difficult to get my head around the amount of money involved.

I welcome this Bill and the fact that money will be made available for small businesses, including primary producers that were excluded from the previous scheme. According to figures from the Central Statistics Office, CSO, with which I am sure the Minister of State is familiar, small to medium enterprises employing fewer than 200 people account for 99.8% of all enterprises and 69% of all persons engaged and micro-enterprises employing fewer than ten people account for 92% of all enterprises. What the figures tell us is that these enterprises are the backbone of the country. That is almost a cliché that we hear repeated in the House all of the time. I am now repeating that cliché by talking about the small businesses being the backbone of the country.

I tried to get my head around this. We are talking about loans of between €25,000 and more than €1 million. There is a guarantee given up to 80% and the scheme will be put through the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland. I am not sure why we have banks in the first place if they are not functioning. Maybe it is for another day to discuss the banks we bailed out. We have very little competition. Ulster Bank and KBC Bank are about to exit the market and we will be left with only two or three banks and no competition. We need to face the issue of public banking. We tried in the previous Dáil to discuss having a public banking sector and we were laughed at. It is an issue to which we must return.

This is a specific short technical Bill with a narrow scope, as described by a Department official at a meeting of the joint committee in April 2021. It allows the Ministers to make agreements with the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland valued at up to €50 million. It is not the first legislation on this. We previous had the European Investment Fund Agreement Act 2018.

I do not want to sound like a parrot. I like to make information my own and understand it. I am having a little difficulty, however, especially as the committee did not do pre-legislative scrutiny. It is becoming a daily occurrence that we get legislation under pressure and pass it under pressure without pre-legislative scrutiny. We did this earlier with the Private Security Services (Amendment) Bill 2021 which I agreed with because it is good. It was an area that needed to be teased out and this area certainly needs to be teased out. We are talking Monopoly money here which we never seem to have for eradicating poverty, building public housing on public land or having an active role for the State. We have no problem with it here, however. I welcome that but it is not producing transformative change.

Let me stay with the positives in the sense that funding will be provided for primary producers, including smaller farmers and fishermen who were excluded. It will not be as difficult as it is now to get that funding, which will be available for a longer period of up to six years, and there will be more money involved. I looked at all the existing schemes and I could not work out how many are redundant and what analysis has been done on these, including those that will conclude at the end of this year. What money has been allocated that has not been used up? Where is that money going and what conditions are attached, if any, to learning from the pandemic that we can only go forward having transformed our economy?

I am from Galway and I am more than aware of how Covid has affected Galway city and county and the wider the region. My opinion is backed up by the Covid-19 regional economic analysis published last year which identified the west, from Galway right up to Donegal, as being particularly affected and exposed because of Brexit and Covid. We also had the Spending Review 2020: An assessment of the impact of Brexit and Covid-19 on Údarás na Gaeltachta and its client companies. The Tánaiste, in a lighter moment, told me he would read it at Christmas in bed. I hope he did. These companies are particularly exposed because most of their exports are still going to England.

Where is the forum for monitoring what is happening so that we as Deputies who represent the people on the ground can explain what is happening and say what is good and bad and what has not worked. Like all Deputies, including the Minister of State, Deputy English, I have hairdressers telling me they will go under because they cannot get money from the bank and they do not want a loan and have never one. The report from the Central Bank confirmed that most small enterprises did not want a loan. When they got into difficulty they wanted liquidity for a period of time. They did not want a loan. We have never really looked at a once-off grant to many of these businesses to allow them to restart and keep going. I am aware there are restart grants but I am not talking about such a minute basis.

I will support this legislation under protest. It should be scrutinised at committee level to educate those of us who are not on the relevant committee because we would take the trouble of reading the reports and presentations. That did not happen with this Bill.

There is such a list of supports now I do not know which ones are redundant. I am repeating and I am averse to repetition. It is very difficult for us, despite the best efforts of officials from the Department who appeared before a limited session of the committee and explaining the issue to it. I take my hat off to them. Does the Minister of State know what I am mean? We need a proper analysis if I am not able to go out and explain to businesses on the ground in Galway what is available, what is not available and what are the problems. What interaction has there been with Údarás na Gaeltachta in relation to all those businesses in the Gaeltachta that have been badly hit by Brexit, and then Covid on top of that.

I appeal to the Minister of State to use the committee system. It is all we have to scrutinise matters. Having spent four years as a member of the Committee of Public Accounts and having read the reports every week, what I learned was that scrutiny is essential if we are to avoid a waste of money, to put it benignly, not to mention corruption and all sorts of other issues that we should be looking at. The Committee of Public Accounts looks retrospectively. Membership of the committee was a university education for me.

Now we are back with very little scrutiny of all of these schemes. The most important aspect is that we are not even sure if the schemes we are introducing are meeting the needs of the businesses on the ground and primary producers. Until now, the take-up on a range of schemes has been so low, one would wonder how were they ever brought in in the first place. We need a debate on the transformative action that is needed arising from Covid and climate change and how we use State funding to best do that. I am the first to say such funding should go to the smaller enterprises because they are the backbone and we are utterly reliant on them in all of our towns, cities and villages.

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