Budget 2026 (Enterprise, Tourism and Employment): Statements Seanad Éireann — 2025-10-14 ============================================================ Gareth Scahill (FG), Nominated by the Taoiseach The Minister stated, "Budget 2026 is a pro-enterprise budget that recognises the critical link between industrial development, infrastructure investment and job creation." In this volatile time, the focus was on protecting the 2.81 million jobs in our economy that we cannot take for granted. First and foremost, the reduction of the VAT rate from 13.5% to 9% has straight away saved and protected 191,000 jobs that would probably be the most susceptible in a volatile economy. The Minister must be credited for that. I also welcome the research and development tax credit. To bring it down to a local idea, in Monksland in County Roscommon we have Novo Nordisk, an international company that announced large-scale job cuts recently enough. Thankfully, the Monksland site was exempted from a large percentage of those cuts. That is directly related to the investment this country has made in research and development tax credits, and the 5% increase introduced in the budget. Indirectly, we have probably protected an awful lot more jobs with that initiative as well. I commend the Minister on that. We in this House constantly talk about supporting small businesses. Budget 2026 has strengthened regional development and supported our local enterprise offices. We have spoken continuously about the cost of business advisory forum and the small business unit, which are all welcome initiatives from the Minister's Department. I am very impressed with the national enterprise hub. How an initiative like that had not been thought of years ago is beyond me, but bringing it all together it is exactly what our businesses, especially small businesses, need. We need to weigh some of the supports available for small businesses and there needs to be a lot more collaboration with other Departments. For example, the Department of rural and community development has a town centre first initiative to create public realms. As Senator Nelson Murray said, we cannot create initiatives that jeopardise small enterprises or take away parking spaces from businesses. The Minister's Department needs to support those businesses and make sure that initiatives cannot be introduced from other Departments that will take from them. I will let Senator O'Donovan take over on tourism. --- Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted. Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/seanad/2025-10-14/debate/main Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:54:13+00:00 Sitting date: 2025-10-14