Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

There were a lot of questions there and I will go through them. First, I refer to the Deputies who have raised their areas. From a Cork perspective, in Cork County Council, we expect that 15,718 businesses may be eligible. In Cork City Council, the figure is 6,857. Therefore, across Cork city and county, there are approximately 23,000 businesses that may be eligible. These are not small numbers. In Dublin City Council the number is 17,558; in Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council it is 4,409; and in Fingal County Council it is 5,481. In Carlow, the figure is 1,909.

Approximately 96% of rate-paying businesses, or virtually all of them, are eligible for this scheme. The ones that are not eligible, of course, are larger businesses that are paying much larger rates, such as large retailers, large manufacturing facilities, etc., that may be paying rates of €40,000, €50,000, €60,000 or €100,000. Of course, very big businesses are paying much more than that. The idea here was to find a mechanism to get cash to businesses because we knew they would be under some pressure in the first quarter of this year as they are adapting to policy and other factors that have been increasing the cost of running their businesses. We wanted to acknowledge that as a Government, and to help them with cash flow. We wanted to concentrate on small- and medium-sized businesses.

We know that the experience of TBESS and other schemes is that when there is a lot of form-filling and bureaucracy, many of the smallest businesses will not get involved. This is because they would need to take on an accountant to do it and they would need to interact with the Revenue Commissioners to do it, etc. For all sorts of reasons, they are not inclined to respond. Having said that, there were 50,000 applications under TBESS. We spent close to €150 million in taxpayers’ money helping businesses with their energy bills. It was not a small contribution.

However, this is significantly more than that. This is more than €250 million. For some businesses, this will be a relatively small amount of money. We used the rates base because it was one of the few datasets that we knew we could access quickly. We could work with local authorities to effectively get money out to businesses without them having to apply or fill out forms at all. They only have to confirm that they are an operating business, they are tax compliant and they are rates compliant in terms of having an arrangement with local authorities. It was therefore a quick way of getting a lot of money out to a lot of businesses in a relatively short space of time. This is not an easy thing to do - trust me - but that is what we have done.

I will acknowledge that for many businesses, particularly in the areas of food retail and other forms of retail, there has been a combination of an increase in the minimum wage, the extension of statutory sick leave, planning for future auto-enrolment, a VAT increase since the last budget, particularly for the hospitality sector, parental leave, energy costs and supply chain costs. All these things together are making it very difficult for businesses in some sectors to make margins at the moment. We are looking at what we can do beyond this support to help those businesses.

The Minister, Deputy Michael McGrath-----

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