Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Before I was elected as a Deputy I worked as a management consultant. I worked with about 2,000 small businesses either training them or consulting them on how to operate their businesses. I also worked as a sole trader so I know what it is like to be self-employed. At the heart of being self-employed is actually the fact that one is living hand to mouth. The contracts that a person wins this month will pay the mortgage and electricity in three months' time, and the contracts that are delivered this month will put the food on the table in the immediate months afterwards. If those contracts are not won or not delivered on, then one simply will not be able to pay the mortgage or feed the family. It is a very precarious type of work. We often talk here about precarious work, and rightly so in terms of workers' rights, but it is important to realise that the self-employed people with smaller enterprises often live in a very precarious situations.

Small to medium-sized businesses are the backbone of this country. Some 70% of the people employed in this country are employed by SMEs, which is 1.2 million people. It is an incredible chunk of people. Incredibly, 99% of businesses are actually small businesses, micro businesses, and businesses with fewer than ten people.

Foreign direct investment is good. Foreign direct investment is important for the State but I believe the Government is solely focused on foreign direct investment at the cost of focusing on small to medium sized businesses. When foreign direct investment says, "Jump", the Government says, "How high?". Mostly, however, small to medium sized businesses are ignored in the Government's economic policy. They are the poor relation of the Government's economic policy. For sure the Government will say that it provides a fund for this and a grant for that, and while this is good to help struggling businesses, in reality it amounts to social welfare for businesses in trouble. Businesses would much rather have the ability to work in an environment that is beneficial and in which it is easy to make a living rather than having all the difficulties the Government puts in their way and then having the funds to help them.

I will give the Minister of State a number of examples of this. Hospitality especially was hammered by the Government in the lengthy lockdowns the Government imposed in the State. Indeed, that changed the behaviour of many people when it came to hospitality and the music industry. Many hospitality businesses are crucified by the cost-of-living crisis. It is incredible the Government made €3.5 billion on fuel taxes last year, which was the highest in ten years. In the jaws of a cost-of-living crisis, the Government was giving tea and sympathy to small businesses with one hand while at the same time was pilfering their pockets with higher fuel taxes with the other hand. The small businesses were especially fleeced as a result of these cost-of-living crises.

The migration crisis has also hit the hospitality sector in a large way. Incredibly, almost one third of registered tourism stock outside of Dublin is now contracted to the State. This is a stunning figure. A response to a parliamentary question I submitted shows that 85% of accommodation the Government is using is in the hospitality sector. As a result of the Government's abject uselessness when it comes to delivering infrastructure projects, it is leaning heavily on the hospitality sector to provide that accommodation. This is hammering the downstream tourism businesses in many towns. Fáilte Ireland has said that non-accommodation providers in sector will lose €1.1 billion in revenues as a result of the Government's leaning on the hospitality sector to provide that accommodation.

The Government VAT rate for small businesses is also hammering those small businesses. There is a madness around this. I refer to Deputy Boyd Barrett's comments on this. He said that while there are big hotel chains in the sector making massive profits, there were also small cafes, pubs and restaurants that are struggling. The logic is that one would separate those two sectors within the hospitality area. They have different market structures and different profitability and turnover levels, and they have very few similarities in terms of how their businesses operate. Aontú was the first party to come up with the idea to separate out those two elements of the hospitality sector. We would leave the high level of VAT on the massively profitable businesses and we would lower the VAT rate on the smaller businesses so they could operate, and especially in a small towns. Aontú was also the first to come up with a new business rate idea whereby the business rate reflects the profitability, at least in part, of the businesses on which they are being levied. This is really important because the Amazons of this world cannot be treated the same as the independent book retailers that operate in small towns. If we continue to levy the business rate in the same fashion, we will give the advantages to the Amazons of this world, which will gut the inner sections of our towns and villages across the country.

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