Mary Fitzpatrick (Fianna Fail)

While the Minister is grabbing this by both horns, I wish him well too. I have full confidence in his capacity to deliver in this very important Department. We are very privileged with the economy and we should not forget to appreciate and express our gratitude to everyone who works and contributes to the economy on a daily basis. We are the envy of many countries, not just in Europe but all around the world for the strength of our economy. Other economies struggled to come back post Covid but our economy came back faster and stronger and, for that, every worker in the country deserves credit.

I welcome the Government's recognition of the need to not take our position in the global economy for granted, and that we must always be vigilant and work to ensure the economy is resilient. We will achieve that by investing in it and supporting those who make the economy, create employment and ensure there is a constant process of innovation. Competitiveness is crucial for our economic development. The initiative the Minister is taking in his Department is important. I welcome the timeline he outlined in that regard today. It is helpful. There is significant interest from the sector in the work he proposes to do on behalf of the Government. Competitiveness is crucial for driving innovation, boosting productivity and attracting investment, including foreign direct investment. The latter does not just manifest in buildings and the trade figures but also in employment, which directly affects the lives of citizens – the quality of their lives, their employment and their professional development as individuals. Competitiveness enhances our ability to trade globally.

In the not-too-distant past, Ireland moved from being a closed economy but now we are on the global stage and in an open economy. That contributes directly to changing the lives of every one of our citizens - their standard of living, their life experience and life outcomes. It is important that the Government is ever-vigilant on this issue, that the new Government takes it seriously, and that a Minister has been assigned to it and is pulling together all of the stakeholders and working with a sense of purpose and urgency.

I was nominated to contest the Seanad election by RGDATA. The Minister will be very familiar with the organisation as he has been and is a supporter of small businesses. It represents more than 3,500 independent Irish retailers, primarily food retailers. My colleagues and I met representatives of RGDATA recently. They have real expectations. I believe the Minister is alive to their needs, including addressing the ever-increasing costs of doing business. Their viability as businesses is under threat because of the increasing costs associated with energy, insurance premiums and other associated regulation costs. They welcome the Government's commitment to support their businesses going forward. They need direct supports to help them tackle those costs and continue to trade as viable businesses, serving local communities, creating local employment and generating trade in their local markets. They are under very significant threat from retail crime. Globally, Ireland records the highest cost of retail crime. The average cost is estimated at €40,000 a year. That is €40,000 a year directly out of the bottom line of those small, independent Irish businesses. The initiative by the Government to establish the retail crime group and strategy and the commitment by the Minister for Justice, Deputy Jim O'Callaghan, to increase safety and reduce crime in the retail space is very important, not just for the small retailers but also for the very large retailers. I know big retailers in my area on Henry Street are engaged in this subject too.

In the remaining few minutes, I wish to talk about Dublin. I am obviously a Dub but, whatever about our selfish interest in Dublin, it accounts for more than 40% of our economic activity. We are blessed with the level of economic activity, employment and investment that is taking place here and the innovation and resilience of the economy in the capital, but we cannot take it for granted. There are a few issues that employers and business operators in the capital are calling out very clearly that they want the Government to address.

The first one is infrastructural, namely, housing. They say very clearly that housing is their number one issue. They want to see the supply of housing in the capital increase significantly. They also want to see affordable housing. In the next four years the Government has a real opportunity to introduce targeted, timebound measures for Dublin-specific housing supply initiatives.Specifically from a Dublin perspective, I would like to see targeted measures to increase supply, the affordability of homes in the capital and the acceleration of adaptive reuse. We have quite a significant commercial vacant space. Other cities have successfully adapted commercial vacant space for residential use. New York has endless examples of it. We should be pushing that and accelerating it in Dublin. The living city initiative has had very limited success in Dublin. I believe it is down to the fact the programme is just too narrow and too limited. There needs to be a review of the living city initiative to extend it, not just geographically but also fiscally, to reflect the real costs of trying to adapt vacant and derelict properties in the capital.

Under the previous Government, the vacant and derelict grants up to €70,000 were introduced. They have been hugely successful. A total of 31 local authorities have rolled them out and they have worked well. In the programme for Government there is a commitment to a €100,000 above the shop grant. That is there to reflect the additional costs involved with conversion, fire safety and building regulations in those type of buildings. If we can get that grant rolled out and available, there will be a significant take up. The Minister and I both know that the fastest and most sustainable way to increase our housing supply is to reuse the vacant properties that are already there and are connected to electricity and all the utilities.

I will mention two last things from the capital's perspective. One is the water infrastructure. Today, Irish Water was calling for an additional €2 billion investment. That funding needs to be made available. Dublin is on a knife edge with water. We need to increase the supply and security of our water. We have already been on water notices this year and we are only in May. The urgency on that cannot be overstated. On public transportation, we have come a long way from the humble Dublin Bus. It is still one of my favourite modes of transports. The Luas was a great innovation and having it extended to Finglas is very important. The metro has been talked about and talked about. We need to get on with it. This Government needs to deliver it for the capital. In tandem with all of that, public transportation needs to be affordable and safe. For it to be safe, we need the commitment that the Government has made for a public transport police to be delivered.

I wish the Minister well. The public and the citizens we serve are demanding that the Government takes competitiveness seriously and supports businesses and entrepreneurs to deliver on it because it is good, not just for our economy but also, as I said earlier, for our environment, our citizens and the overall expectation of our country.