James Reilly (Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister of State. I also welcome his comments about SMEs and the commitment the Government is showing to the sector. As others have said, SMEs are the backbone of our economy. In rural Ireland, they can be the backbone of the community as well. As somebody who believes that the economy is extremely important insofar as it supports society, it is critical that we remind ourselves of that.

Many positive things have been done and all objective barometers speak to the success Ireland has had in reducing unemployment to its current rate of 5.8%. Who would have believed, back in 2011 and 2012, that this would be possible?At that time, unemployment was more than 15%. We can see the recovery occurring. It is a word that can sometimes upset people but it is real and in business we see it. The difficulties emerging now are different, as Senator Ó Céidigh just has just pointed out. It is, in fact, about trying to get human resources to work in companies, because as more and more people are at work it becomes more difficult.

I want to mention many of the achievements made through the local employment offices, LEOs, with 15,000 net jobs created, almost 13,000 clients approved for priming grants and 7,500 training programmes with more than 100,000 participants. This is all since 2014. There is also the development of Ireland's best young entrepreneur with 1,471 applications in 2017.

I am very pleased the issue of Brexit has been mentioned because it is on many people's minds. One of the serious considerations with regard to SMEs and the Small Firms Association is the fact many people, because they do not directly export to the UK, were not aware of the fact Brexit would have a huge impact on them because they might be second or third down the line in supplying people who do export. While we have a Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, agribusiness is also hugely important. We have the Brexit SME scorecard, which the Government introduced to help people measure where they are at, technical assistance for microenterprise and the nationwide roll-out of the Lean for Micro programme, which will make small businesses more efficient and competitive. All of these measures are very welcome.

As Government spokesperson in the Seanad on enterprise, innovation and business, I want to highlight these issues but I do not want to be accused of forgetting what problems remain for us, and there are problems. The Minister of State mentioned the great supports now in place for female entrepreneurship. As Senator Ó Céidigh just pointed out, there are wider Government considerations with regard to helping in this regard, such as childcare costs, broadband and other issues that have an impact on people's ability to strike out on their own and make a career for themselves as self-employed persons.

There also are issues with regard to personal insurance and what the Government seeks to achieve in this regard. This issue was highlighted by my colleague, Senator Butler. Somebody could be an employer of 15 people and if the business goes bust, he or she is left high and dry while all the employees are looked after through social welfare. There are all these anachronisms that we must still address. We have started to address them and I welcome this. As a member of the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Business, Enterprise and Innovation, I am struck by the issues raised by SMEs, the Small Firms Association and others on the challenges of costs of doing business in this country. One of the issues was rates, which I will not go into in any great detail.

Another issue that warrants greater attention is the cost of finance, on which the Government has done lot in terms of the microfinancing put in place but there is a need for a third force and a different type of bank in the country. I am thinking specifically of Sparkasse banks, which have been here on a number of occasions and have presented to the committees on finance and business, enterprise and innovation. They have invited both committees to see the model in action. They do not seek to own a bank here but want to mentor a similar model. It is an old-style bank that has survived 200 years in Germany, including two world wars, great depressions and everything else. It is bank that still believes in going down to the customers and walking the land or business with them and understanding their strengths and weaknesses. It is a bank that believes in community and contributes back to the community. We need to progress this and I ask the Minister of State to put to his colleagues that they call upon the Minister for Finance to publish the report sitting on his desk, which has been completed on the possibility of this community-type banking being put in place here. Small businesses still speak to the fact they pay higher rates here than elsewhere in Europe and they still have difficulty in accessing funds.

The other issue on which I want to spend some time is a presentation by the Alliance for Insurance Reform, a group of more than 200 businesses concerned about the startling rise in the cost of insurance in this country. It has not been just onefold, twofold, or threefold but tenfold in some cases, without any transparency as to how the figure presented to the business person is reached. This cannot be sustained and is a real risk and danger to us if it is not addressed. What I particularly liked about the presentation of the Alliance for Insurance Reform was that it outlined the problems and gave examples and concrete evidence and then gave us the solution to the problem as it saw it. It gave us a number of measures, some of which I agree with and others with which I would have issues. One which makes absolute sense to me, and one over which the Government has control, is the setting up of a Garda insurance fraud unit funded by the insurance industry. This is critical. Another measure it suggested is linking sections 26 and 25 of the Civil Liability and Courts Act 2004 in order that exaggerated and misleading claims are automatically forwarded to the Garda for investigation and further assessment, to bring a sense of consequence to those who engage in this ever-increasing fraud perpetrated on businesses. We watched a series of videos showing it very clearly. If people can try to defraud somebody of money and there is no consequence when it is thrown out of court, they just go and do it again and they get more clever about it. If they were to rob a bank we know what would happen. If they were to be involved in non-payment of their taxes we know what would happen but when it comes to fraud, they need not bat an eyelid or worry about a thing.

The insurance alliance asked for ten measures, but the three I would go after are the Garda fraud squad, linking sections 25 and 26, which are intricately related, and not interfering with the Judiciary but merely to have a clear directive in the law whereby if the book of quantum is exceeded by a judge, he or she must explain why that is. My requests are that we look at and publish the report on banking that is on the desk of the Minister for Finance, that the Minister for Justice and Equality encourages the Garda, which is ready to go with this fraud unit, and that the law be changed with regard to sections 25 and 26 and create that link.