Pat Casey (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Leader. I wish to raise two issues, one of which relates to some of our larger or medium-sized towns in rural Ireland where there is no internal public transport link. While we have transport to destinations such as Dublin, Cork or Galway, there is no internal bus service within those towns, whether that might be used by children going to school in the morning, by older people trying to get their shopping done or just to allow people to commute around the towns. Wicklow town has made a proposal on this and Arklow town is looking at it. Providing additional public transport in some of our larger towns that do not have it is a policy that should be looked at.

The second issue I want to raise relates to Arklow Business Enterprise Centre. I was approached by its manager, Mr. Donal Murray, a number of weeks ago about the temporary business energy support scheme, TBESS, for which it failed to qualify because it was deemed to be a passive landlord. All the businesses feed into its bill. The individual units do not have individual meters and therefore they were disqualified. I asked Mr. Murray at the time whether he could get a sense of this countrywide. There is an article today in the newspaper by Siobhán Finn that clearly indicates that more than 270 community enterprise centres and up to 1,800 small and medium-sized businesses could be affected by this throughout the country. In my own community enterprise centre in Laragh we have two tenants. We have a submeter of our own on them, so they did not qualify either. It is not abnormal to have this. It is happening throughout the country. When the scheme was designed I do not believe it was intended to exclude these. What is needed now is to look again at the definition within the legislation to allow these business to apply through the parent operating body, which can then distribute it back to the companies. The parent body knows exactly what is being used. Perhaps the Leader could take that up with the Minister for Finance. Initially, I did it in regard to Arklow Business Enterprise Centre, ABEC. However, the issue is now significantly larger than it was then. There is a strong cohort of businesses that could do with this support.