Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

The response to the plan is welcome. There are two or three issues I wish to highlight. I am concerned about the PUP being phased out for everybody. I am thinking of those who work in live music. I do not mean acts like U2 or Hozier, but the people who play in pubs, at weddings and so on. Their sector is still being decimated and there will be no work for them for a long time. Their PUP needs to be kept at whatever level they are at until they begin to open up. That is very important.

I heard the Minister for Finance talk about the local property tax. He said the money would be good for the local authorities. I want to raise the issue of Galway County Council getting the lowest per capitafunding from the local fund. If we are to have balanced development, we need to rectify that. This has already been cited by an independent committee which looked into the future of Galway County Council. When this money is put in place, I ask that the Government introduce an equalisation fund which will actually benefit the lower-paid counties such as Galway as well as the additional money from the local property tax.

I heard people say that infrastructure is how the economy will develop. We will not be able to put in the houses in Galway East because there are no waste water treatment plants in our towns and villages. We are being pressurised not to build in rural areas. We need a recalibration of what we are doing there. Also on regional development, I heard someone congratulate Cork on getting a new rail network which will cost so many hundreds of millions. A small section of railway needs to be put in place between Athenry and Claremorris to reopen the western rail corridor from Ballina and Westport along the west coast - through Limerick to Foynes, into Galway city, down into Cork, and as far as Waterford Port. That would cost a small bit of money. I ask the Government to include that in the national development plan.

It is important that we consider what we do after Covid. We must learn from mistakes and from the new work practices that are in place. There will be a shift but the way we are dealing with capital funding and how we spend it is so cumbersome. I had a meeting with a city manager recently who explained how when he applies for funding which is announced, he can have to go through 12 gates of approval before he actually sees the colour of the money arriving into the local authority. This is because we have set up so many different barriers and governance issues and have created industries within industries within industries like procurement. I refer, for example to all the paperwork that goes with the tender process. Everything has to go back to approval to somebody else and we cannot allow local authorities to make decisions in their own right. That is a failing in our system which we need to close off.

I now turn to small business people, who represent an important sector. These people have received supports over the past 18 months, but coming to the end of the tax year they were billed because they got supports. They got the money and spent it on trying to keep their businesses going, and then they got a bill from Revenue at the end of the day. We have to be very careful about how we deal with small business people - maybe someone who is employing one other person, or is self-employed - and how they are actually working together. Revenue can be their saviour or can kill them off. It is important that we look at that and be a voice for the small business person.

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