Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

On a light note, I wish you all a happy Valentine's Day. Publicly, I have to say that I apologise to my wife, Kay, that I will not be home this evening, but we will make it up later in the week and might go for a bite of dinner.

I am an employer myself. From the point of view of small businesses, we can hit on all the different topics such as the wage increase. All the employers that I met wanted to have the minimum wage increased. Many of them were left with no option but to up their outlooks to make sure they could cover. The Government has done nothing for them. It could have reduced the VAT rate to 9%, which would have meant that people could have increased their wages and that companies did not have to up their rates in cafés and so on to counteract it. That is what the Government failed on.

If you have a small shop in Limerick or anywhere in a city where there is high footfall, you pay so much in rates per square foot. If you have a small business in a county and are trying to have all the different things for people in the locality, with a bigger premises but not the footfall, you are being penalised by so much per square foot. The Government has to look at footfall when it is doing rates systems. There could be a small shop which is sustainable and a bigger shop in the countryside which does not have the footfall, which is penalised for looking after the local people.

See this speech in context