Marie Sherlock (Labour) | Oireachtas source

On the Minister of State's last comment, I hope he is looking at State contracts. We have an endemic problem with low pay in Ireland. If we are serious about ever changing that, we need to look at how the might of the State and the State procurement budget of more than €17 billion is used.

I very much welcome that this scheme is not going to cost the local authorities a penny. The Minister of State's predecessors will have heard many of us talk, during the height of the pandemic, about the exclusionary nature of some of the Covid supports when they were targeted at ratepayers. I am thinking in particular of two events caterers who operate out of Dublin 9. In the middle of the pandemic, they asked me why every other small business was getting support when they were being excluded because they were operating out of a non-rateable premises. They were decimated during the pandemic because their business dried up. It is a mistake to be exclusionary. The Minister of State referred to 87% of businesses but the other 13% of businesses, many of them small, are trying to get up off the ground and unfortunately they are excluded from the scheme.