Small and Medium Enterprises
Dail Éireann — 2025-11-13
============================================================

Barry Ward (FG), Dún Laoghaire

I acknowledge all of that and in no way want to suggest the Minister is not focusing on SMEs. I acknowledge all of the work that is being done. I know SMEs are the backbone of the economy. The quibble I have in relation to the VAT 9 reduction is that it is across the board. That does not mean that big businesses are not valuable - of course, they are - but they do not need the reduction in the way that small businesses do. We have had this conversation previously and I would much rather see a targeted relief for small businesses. Whether one picks a metric of turnover, profit, number of employees or something else, there is a metric that can be picked to do this. Let us take McDonald's as an example. McDonald's is a franchise and is owned by business people all over the country who run good businesses. They will survive without the reduction to 9%. Next door to them there might be a small café that might not survive without it. The point I am making relates to the cost of this measure. As I have said, I support the measure but in terms of its cost, we would be much better off spending the bulk of that money on the SME sector than on those parts of the hospitality sector that do not need it, the large and very large companies that still provide huge value in the economy but that do not have the same reliance on the scheme.

---

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/dail/2025-11-13/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-09-21T01:01:06+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-11-13