Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The Deputy has raised an important point in that this is something we are trying to get the balance right on. We believe that the success and the future growth of the retail sector is to develop a sustainable online retail business as well as to continue with the high street presence. As a Government, under the programme for Government, our intention is to support both elements of that. The online trading vouchers are to enable those who already have a digital presence to expand that and to increase their sales and rather than to just sell to people in Cork or their local county, they can sell from Cork to Belfast, the UK, to France and so on. A big part of the work of this scheme which is administered by Enterprise Ireland is to try also to encourage that internationalisation of their business. There is great potential there.

We carry out a review after each round and make changes to the scheme to address that. The overall area of these schemes and the online trading voucher is being reviewed again to see how we can best enable here. Part of this is encouragement to invest in the digital online presence and to help with the skills and the marketing, to build on that and not just to have the presence. We see a great deal of potential here.

To put it in figures, at this moment in time more than 70% of online sales in this country are still purchases from abroad. We believe that that is the opportunity to develop the retail sector, to make it more sustainable to complement the on-the-street presence.

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