Róisín Garvey (Green Party) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister and congratulate him on his promotion. It is great to have him on board the enterprise, trade and employment challenge. I worked with his predecessors. I will focus on a few matters as the Green Party's spokesperson on that portfolio and also its rural development spokesperson. Both of these briefs tie in nicely with the importance of small businesses. Not only are small businesses important in cities but they are all we have in a lot of towns and villages. Towns are becoming homogenised, and that is because only the big multinationals and chain stores can afford the rates or can afford to have bricks-and-mortar buildings on the streets. If there is not a significant intervention to support small businesses, every town will look the same. There will be a thousand McDonald's outlets and no small coffee shops or bakeries. It will be all multinationals and large profits and small business will disappear, as is happening.

There are 309,000 SMEs, of which 281,000 are micro-sized, comprising between one and ten people. Those are the people who are creating most of the jobs in this country, not the multinationals, despite all we think about how great they are and despite us always going on about the likes of Google. The majority of jobs in this country are a result of hardworking self-employed people who employ other people. I had this out with Sinn Féin previously and, ironically, its representatives are not in the Chamber for this debate. They always talk about the poor workers and say employers are the big problem. For so many people I know, employers are the workers, and they are the ones who need our help and who are trying to do everything they can to pay their staff and keep on the lights. It is a huge issue and the Minister has been handed a can of worms. His predecessor tried to address this, as did his predecessor. It was Leo Varadkar when I first came to the House, who was followed by Simon Coveney and now Peter Burke. He will have maybe a year until the next election but there are some simple issues we need to look at in the meantime. We cannot treat all businesses the same. As I said earlier at the meeting of the rural development committee, it is like treating the Larry Goodmans the same as a guy with 20 dry suckler cows. We have to have a nuanced, intelligent debate if we are to sort out small businesses. They cannot be treated like the big ones. The CEOs of our local authorities cannot say let us up the rates, give all the councillors a couple more quid with a discretionary fund to keep them quiet, and increase the rates because we will make more money. The small businesses will say they cannot afford that and get out of here, and then the big ones will come in to replace them. We have to hold on to the beauty of the individuality, culture and nature that make up our towns and villages, which are the backbone of our tourism and of all our jobs. We are losing it and that is a serious issue.

What can we do? I think we need to look at rates and reduce them based on the profits and size of the business. It should not be based on the size of the building. Another issue is that if a business is not an owner-occupier, its landlord will have no impetus or encouragement to upgrade the building. There is a lot of money available for retrofitting, upgrading, installing solar panels and so on, and that is something really good the Government has done in this Department, but if the business does not own the building, it will be reliant on the landlord giving a damn, and the landlord will not care if the bills are not his or hers. We need some kind of carrot for landlords, because it is going to increase the value of the building in any event. It is difficult because some of the green measures we have pushed in are really good if the business owns the building.

I could go on about this but I am sure the Minister has heard a lot of it previously. We should also extend the terms of the SBCI loans for businesses. That was very helpful during Covid. People are trying to pay back everything weekly, and while some of them are managing and catching up, there were huge loans because of Covid. I invited Eamon Ryan to Ennis recently. He met representatives of every small business in the town and there was a real heart to heart. Small businesses want to pay back their suppliers and pay back all their loans. There was a good model during Covid and we need to look at that again.

There are a lot of local enterprise offices and, as I have seen over the past three years, we have given them more money and staff but they are not doing what we need them to do. We need to have a review of the local enterprise offices and of what they are doing with our money. Are we getting bang for our buck and are small businesses getting the supports they need? Small businesses keep telling me they do not want any more consultants, mentors, training or help with website design. They did all that during Covid. They need hard cash to reduce the costs and they need investment. The green for micro programme is a brilliant idea, with a free two-day energy audit. I have told many small businesses about it because, for some reason, the LEOs are not telling them about it. It is not known about but it is worth €2,500. The auditors come in and, without any judgment, impugnment or anything, they look at all the business's energy costs, losses and demands. Thanks to my work with Leo Varadkar in the year we entered government, there is funding in the form of a direct grant that will give businesses the money they need to deal with the findings of that free energy audit. Five businesses in Clare got it last year but the target for the LEO was 17. What is that about? At a national level, as a Government we are giving money to the LEOs, ISME and everybody else but we have to look at how they are spending it. Are we listening to small businesses on the ground that are crying out for help?We keep throwing money at the problem but it is not going to where it is needed. I will forward the Minister on that note. I am looking forward to meeting with him and working on that specific issue. I will help the Minister in any way I can. I am here to support the small businesses of Ireland. Like the small farmers, they are the most important thing to protect the beauty of this country in order that people will still come here and it will not look like downtown New York or Paris. We have a uniqueness in our small businesses and we need to protect them in every way we can.