Denis Landy (Labour)

I move:

That Seanad Éireann:

- notes with grave concern the difficult economic position faced by many of those engaged in small business at this time;

- notes the need to make more supports available for those who are self-employed;

- proposes that the Government consider the adoption of a number of measures specifically to support small business and those who are self-employed, to include:

(a) addressing the difficulties with late payments for those contracted to provide goods and services to the public sector;

(b) opening up the rules on tender and procurement again to enable a wider range of firms and businesses to seek public contracts;

(c) the provision of greater levels of social protection, including protection in the event of illness, for those who are self-employed; and in particular for those whose business fails leading to a collapse of income;

(d) addressing high levels of local authority rates;

(e) enabling company directors to invest money from their private pension funds into their businesses; and

(f) ensuring increased levels of access to credit and finance facilities for small and medium enterprises.

I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Perry, to the House. It is a privilege to move the motion. I welcome, in the Gallery, a number of representatives of the Irish Small and Medium Enterprises Association, Small Firms Association, Dublin Chamber of Commerce and local chambers of commerce, including the Letterkenny and County Laois chambers. I will be parochial and give a special welcome to my colleague from the Carrick-on-Suir Business Association, Seamus Campbell, a good Letterkenny man who supports Finn Harps.

When a retailer opens his or her shop door in the morning he or she is at once a worker, a business person and an employer. I wish to debunk the myth that the Labour Party is anti-business. The majority of my Labour Party colleagues in the Seanad are either directly involved in business, come from a business background or are from families who own a business. My mother ran a greengrocer's shop for many years, while my father bought bread from my grandfather, a baker, and established a bread round in south County Tipperary. He remained self-employed for many years.

Social democrats across Europe, especially in the Scandinavian countries, have been to the forefront of business and business opportunity. Europe has some of the greatest economies in the world, notwithstanding the global recession. That is proof positive that social democrats can also be business people who are pro-business, particularly pro-small business, as that is what we are discussing here today.

Unlike the banks, the Labour Party is open for business and open to business. We sincerely welcome the visitors to the Public Gallery so they can witness this debate which I hope will be of assistance to small businesses. In the last Administration the Labour Party served in, under the then Minister for Finance, Deputy Ruairí Quinn, the Labour Party and its Fine Gael colleagues in government created 1,000 jobs per week. When we left government in 1997, this country was on a sound financial footing. I will not go into the history that followed, we are all aware of what happened.

This Government so far has introduced an action plan for jobs and the Minister of State is directly involved in it. We aim to create 100,000 jobs in the next number of years. We aim to put €150 million into capital schemes for small businesses, to create a micro-loan funds scheme of €100 million for small businesses and we are already providing assistance and mentoring to small businesses across the country. The county and city enterprise systems have been turned upside down and Enterprise Ireland is now coming to the fore for the provision of services and employment opportunities in Ireland. We are doing a good job and we have only been in government for a year. There are, however, many other things that need to be done. This motion is about the issues that we see as Labour Party Senators who have listened, discussed and seen through our own life experiences the pressure placed on small businesses.

This motion is an attempt to focus the attention of Government on a number of specific areas. My colleagues will deal with the specifics in detail as we go through the debate. We want to see positive action on late payments and an open tender process where it does not cost small businesses to submit tenders, as is the case in Britain. We want to ensure there is social protection for the self-employed who, currently, if they are sick must rely on their savings to survive or, if they lose their business, have no social protection at all. The person who opens the door is a worker but he is also self-employed so he or she should be treated the same. We want to tackle high business rates. I served on a local authority for almost 25 years and those rates are crippling small businesses, particularly in rural Ireland. We want to see opportunities for savings and pension schemes to be reinvested into one's own business or certainly into the general business world. Most importantly, we want to see real access to credit, not what we hear from the banks. Last year, despite what the banks said, the Central Bank reports that only €3.1 billion was made available to small businesses. This year the target is €7 billion and we want every cent of that to be available to small businesses. The Government has put that in place and we want to ensure it can be drawn down. I spent an hour with an accountant on Monday and he told me of five cases where the bank offered the loan but the terms were so prohibitive that not one of his clients could take it.

We welcome the efforts of business in this country. Chartered Accountants Ireland has made free business mentoring available to struggling small businesses. Is that not socialism at work? I think it is. It is the social democratic attitude to help a fellow person who is struggling. We have also seen at local level strong businesses mentoring new and up and coming businesses. We have seen 30,000 civil servants retiring in the last few months, some of them at 50 years of age, who have collateral and funding and who want to start small businesses. They have good ideas and we need to encourage people to put the money into starting businesses and creating employment.

We acknowledge the problems that have been outlined by ISME, the Small Firms Association and Dublin Chamber of Commerce that there are delays of up to 120 days in payments, which is unsustainable for any small business. The lack of a social welfare safety net is a major problem for small businesses, as are the difficulties in the tendering process, the high costs for energy and transport and the resistance of banks to lending. We recognise all of these problems. Our target and that of business in this country should be that most of the €14 billion per annum put up by Government and local authorities for tendering should be kept in this country. That equates to 11.5% of GNP, a huge amount.

During this debate, my colleagues will outline in detail how the Labour Party feels these issues can be tackled and how together with the business organisations and community, the worker can remain as an employer and we can work together in small, medium and large businesses.