John Crown (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I made the point once that I was the first person in my family to go to university but if I had gone into the retail trade I would not have been the first, second or third to do so, perhaps the fourth or fifth, and what is more I might have done so in a small town. My father owned a shop in Brooklyn, New York. Both my grandparents, my father for a while, my aunt and my cousins all ran small businesses in smaller towns in Ireland. I have a certain feeling for the current sadness and tragedy surrounding the threatened demise of the sector.

I ask Senators not to think me judgmental, but If we are to spend our time today productively, not just singing hymns to Mom and apple pie about what we would like to see happening, we should provide some specifics. I would like to throw my strong support behind the argument that the Government should adopt Senator Quinn's upward-only rent review Bill and try to push it through remaining Stages in both Houses. If there are problems which need to be overcome in terms of constitutionality we should deal with them and not merely reject the Bill.

I have a couple of somewhat radical suggestions, one of which I have made before. One of the problems businesses face does not concern attracting people back into town centres. Many businesses are marginal because they are groaning under a colossal weight of debt incurred in the easy money days of the Celtic tiger. This is not necessarily because the people who borrowed the money were irresponsible but rather they were told the rules had been changed and it was okay to take a bigger loan than they would have been given beforehand. There was no longer the belief a person could borrow only a certain percentage of income. It was thought to be easier to take large amounts because the property value a person held would always go up. People were professionally advised to do this by those who should have known better and often, through limited fault of their own, they found themselves facing unsustainable levels of debt that might make their businesses go under.

That kind of desperate situation needs novel solutions. I have made the point before and will continue to do so whenever I get a captive Minister. There is €100 billion of Irish wealth tied up in private pension funds, €90 billion of which is outside the country and cannot be accessed by people when they need it, at a time when it might keep their business afloat or their house in their possession. I have made the point before, and Deputy Mitchell O'Connor has made a similar suggestion in the other House, that when businesses are genuinely in trouble and there is a pot of money available, the discretion should exist with the pension investor to apply to get premature access to his or her pension to pay whatever tax penalty is necessary and get money which might keep the business afloat.

I have also suggested an idea I believe to be particularly relevant in this area. The Government should consider introducing some kind of pilot scheme to take people off social welfare and out of unemployment by redeploying the money that would be paid to them and pay it to a business to employ them, mandating that business to top up the amount of income involved to a reasonable living wage. This would mean the person who is currently getting a subsistence living on unemployment payments would get a bigger family income and would return some money to the Exchequer by way of tax. In addition, the businesses would have an opportunity to restore some competitive advantage by having some percentage of their workforce effectively being partially subsidised by the Government. It is a win-win-win situation. The only constituency that would not like it are our masters in Europe. Given that we have so many hundreds, perhaps thousands, of unemployed lawyers in the country, I do not believe we would have any difficulty ganging them up in the European courts for five or ten years until the recession is over and we can tackle the problem of any fines we might accrue.