Simon Harris (Wicklow, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I propose to take Questions Nos. 10 to 12, inclusive, together.

Last month, I chaired the Government’s inaugural competitiveness summit. In attendance were relevant Ministers, together with the chair of the National Competitiveness and Productivity Council, a senior representative of the OECD, and the chief executives of IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland among others from those organisations. The summit saw discussion on the challenges facing our own country in maintaining our competitiveness in a changing international and European context, along with the importance of managing the factors under our domestic control, and the need to address infrastructural deficits, cost pressures and to ensure a pro-enterprise economic environment. The summit focused on three core areas where Ireland needs to respond to secure future competitiveness. First, adapting to European and global disruption, including a changing subsidy landscape, developments in global trade and disruptive technologies. Second, enhancing Ireland’s infrastructure offering, upgrading our energy, water and other infrastructure while minimising cost burdens on firms and households. Third, supporting Irish enterprises to scale and prosper, encouraging entrepreneurship and new technologies, while better controlling the cost base facing businesses.

The summit was an opportunity to consider these challenges in detail in advance of the recent budget. Consistent with discussions at the summit, in budget 2025 the Government took several significant decisions to address our competitiveness challenge. These include the allocation of a record €14.9 billion in voted capital expenditure to address infrastructure demands; the allocation of €3 billion from the proceeds of recent share sales towards boosting public investment in housing, energy and water infrastructure; agreement on a funding package of €1.485 billion over six years from the National Training Fund to, among other things, increase investment in employment-focused skills and training to enhance the competitiveness and productivity of our businesses; provision of additional resources to the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission to focus on identifying and removing barriers to competition in domestic markets; and putting in place a package of measures to support our small and medium businesses to incentivise their growth, including an increase in the threshold for the research and development tax credit, reforms and extension to the startup relief for entrepreneurs and the startup capital Incentive schemes, increases to VAT thresholds, and introducing the power up grant for the retail and hospitality sectors, which will provide those businesses with €4,000 before Christmas towards their electricity costs.

Alongside these decisions in the budget, in support of competitiveness, the Government has also in recent weeks committed to a new initiative to minimise the regulatory burden on our small and medium businesses, including rigorously applying a new SME test across Departments, and by consulting with businesses to identify additional areas where the regulatory burden could be reduced. We progressed the landmark Planning and Development Bill 2023, which passed the Oireachtas last week, bringing about a once in a generation reform to update and streamline our planning system, providing clarity, consistency and certainty. We reconfirmed that, conscious of the cost pressures facing business, the timing and phasing of labour market reforms would continue to be kept under review, taking account of up-to-date impact analysis, to ensure that cost burden on SMEs in most-affected sectors is sustainable.

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