Covid-19 (Enterprise, Trade and Employment): Statements
Dail Éireann — 2021-02-18
============================================================

Leo Varadkar (FG), Dublin West

It is fair enough to state that the stay and spend scheme has not cost very much. It has not cost as much as we had believed because people have been confined to their counties or to within a radius of 5 km. The same applies to the 9% VAT rate. The hospitality sector did not benefit from that in the way we had intended. When we get to the point where hospitality businesses can reopen, which I hope will be in the summer months, we will need to determine what more we can do to help to reboot the industry, which has been closed for much longer than any of us anticipated.

---

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/2021-02-18/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-14T04:49:04+00:00
Sitting date: 2021-02-18