Gareth Scahill (Fine Gael)

I thank the Minister of State for coming to discuss this very important issue. Small businesses and retailers are the very heart, as he said, of our economy. They make up the majority of the businesses in our country, employing two thirds of our workforce. As the Minister of State mentioned, they are the lifeblood and part of the fabric of our towns and communities. they hold everything together.

The headline or overarching message here today is resilience. If we consider what our SMEs have done in the past 15 or 20 years, I do not believe there is an example of a more resilient community anywhere. They managed through the downturn and dealt with Brexit and Covid-19. Many of them are still standing and deserve massive credit for that. I come from a small, rural, family business. I am struck by how dynamic our small business sector is and how people within it can react so quickly and implement things that are necessary for them to survive. If we consider the system here in Leinster House, it is a much bigger juggernaut in the context of actually making changes that will have an impact for those SMEs.

The Minister of State spent a little more than ten minutes talking about all the positive things that have been implemented. I commend the Department on them. I am very impressed with the national enterprise hub. It is a one-stop shop for the SME sector to access all the resources and all of the available supports and grants in one place. It is such a simple idea, it seems mad to think it had not been introduced before. I commend the Department on it in any event. Since its launch, the hub has directly assisted 6,500 SMEs and attracted more than 220,000 users, helping to cut through red tape and ensuring that more companies benefit from the wide range of supports available to them.It is important how that is worded. It is about cutting through red tape and making supports available. The supports are there for many of these businesses but many SMEs would need to take on a consultant to access and find the relevant supports for what they are trying to achieve. I commend that initiative.

The Minister of State commended the local enterprise offices and I am sure everyone who stands up today will acknowledge the great work of those offices. They are supported now by the national enterprise hub. Through our enterprise offices, we can scale up supports and help small businesses digitise, decarbonise and expand into new markets. By 2029, the aim is to have 1,700 more Irish exporters, with small firms playing a leading role in achieving that. I welcome what the Minister of State said about the target of 300,000 extra jobs in that sector.

There are lots of things happening. The Minister of State mentioned the €400 million paid out to the sector in the increased cost of business grant over the past 12 months. The Power Up grant has been extended for people who had miscategorised themselves in the initial round. That was called for in this House so I welcome that.

The next phase will be supporting businesses into new revenue streams and helping them change so we are able to meet our national targets. I like the sound of the clean export guarantee tariff and trying to support our businesses with that. At the moment, SMEs can get up to 60% funding for solar panels and sustainable initiatives, but it is predominantly for their own use rather than for the export tariff. If they plan to produce more energy, they are not able to get the grants for it. We need to support small businesses in tapping into this area and it will benefit us as a country because it will help us hit our climate action targets. The key is energy independence and additional revenue streams to support our businesses. That is not just SMEs and retail. It will also benefit our farming community.

I hope next week we will have word on the reduced VAT rate, on which this House has had extensive discussions. Every Member of this House will have met numerous representative bodies from that sector. In a time of constant cost increases hitting the sector, this is an important measure which will ensure the sustainability and survival of many businesses in the sector. We all wait with bated breath to see what happens on Tuesday. It is important for the survival of rural businesses in particular. I am not so supportive of it hitting the big multinationals that have numerous branches throughout the country. I would love a targeted measure to be introduced. If that cannot be introduced and the system is too rigid to do something like that, we need to look at small coffee shops and the food and hospitality sector. The vast majority of visitors come to this country and, having visited numerous places, what they bring away with them is the people they met and the service they experienced in these sectors.