I thank Deputy Moynihan for his question and ongoing interest in matters relating to people with disabilities. My Department is committed to inclusion with equality of opportunity for all, regardless of disability, gender, civil or family status, sexual orientation, religious belief, age, race or membership of the Traveller community. In particular, my Department leads the Government’s corporate social responsibility agenda and works with businesses through our national corporate social responsibility action plan. …

I thank the Deputy. Enterprise Ireland and the National Disability Authority, NDA, are currently creating a strategy that promotes and supports entrepreneurship and self-employment for people with a disability. The steps being undertaken are the introduction of a broad-based programme offering basic information and training to a large audience of people with disabilities, the development of an awareness campaign which utilises success stories of self-employed and entrepreneurial models with a variety of disabilitie…

I thank the Deputy. I will be happy to follow up on that. My people will be in touch with his people. The pandemic potentially creates an opportunity for people with disabilities, particularly those with a physical disability. The fact that remote working and homeworking have now become normal creates new opportunities for people with disabilities to be involved in the workplace and to run businesses from home, or from accessible remote hubs, and we should seize that chance now.

The programme for Government commits to the formation of an SME growth task force to design a national SME growth plan that will map out an ambitious long-term strategic blueprint beyond Covid-19 and Brexit. The task force will draw up detailed plans to help SMEs to start up, scale up and access foreign markets. This includes any potential improvements to the scope of firms covered by the existing enterprise agencies, and recommendations as to how these can be broadened. It will also look at ways to make SMEs more …

I thank the Deputy. This has come up in my various conversations with business groups. Responsibility for transport and logistics falls to the Minister, Deputy Eamon Ryan, and the Minister of State, Deputy Hildegarde Naughton. However, the Department of Business, Enterprise and Innovation is across this issue because it is essential for business and employment that we have supply chains. The Department of Transport has advised me that we have a great amount of direct capacity in respect of ro-ro ferries from Irelan…

The IMDO report is from 2018. The figure of 40% capacity comes from a more up-to-date report the Department of Transport has done since then. It is not our thinking that everyone will stop using the land bridge. Some hauliers will divert from the British land bridge to direct services. For others, it will still be quicker to go through the UK even if they are stuck there for a few hours. That is the nature of the business, depending on where one is going in continental Europe. That is a decision that will have to b…

Is this the new Covid restrictions subsidy scheme?

We will have more details next week. It will be operated by the Revenue. We intend that it will be open to applications next week. The first payments will be made to companies in November and it will be done on a weekly basis. It will be a payment to help cover their fixed costs when they are closed. It is largely focused at small and medium enterprises, SMEs, and the amount one can claim is based on one's turnover in 2019. It is 10% of the first €1 million and 5% of the second €1 million. The maximum grant that an…

No.

There were two restart grants, as the Deputy knows. There was the original restart grant, which was set up by the previous Government, and then the restart grant plus, which was set up by the new Government as part of the July stimulus. The terms and conditions were different but some businesses were eligible to get both the restart grant and the restart grant plus. There is a small but substantial enough cohort of businesses that did not apply in time for the first restart grant but did get the restart grant plus.…

We are aware of that being an issue. Enterprise Ireland is working on a solution that will help to provide loans to those companies given what is happening in the markets. I will send the Deputy more detail in writing. We are aware of the issue, and Enterprise Ireland is working on a solution to it. The Deputy, whose ministerial experience is showing, is quite right that I have no interest whatsoever in having a maladministration finding made against us by the Ombudsman. If one was entitled to both grants, one shou…

I thank the Deputy for raising this matter. I appreciate that the context has changed but it will change again. One of the features of the pandemic we might not have anticipated months ago is the enormous impact it is having on our city centres and some town centres. The suburbs of Dublin are quite busy but footfall in the city centre is really low. Businesses with a high-cost model, often involving the payment of high rents, covered their costs through high turnover but they no longer have a high turnover and are …

On remote working, there have been some interesting surveys of people who are working remotely. Roughly speaking, approximately 10% to 15% are dying to get back to the office full time. About 10% to 15% want to work from home permanently. There is a large majority in the middle, amounting to about 70%, who would like blended working. I believe that is going to be the future. It involves people going to headquarters for necessary meetings or training one or two days per week and working from home or a remote hub on …

The decision to move Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan to level 4 will come as a bitter blow to the hundreds of thousands of people who live in those counties, although from my contacts with them I think the vast majority understand why it was necessary and that the decision had to be made given the very high instance of the virus in those counties relative to the rest of the State. People living in any other county should not get the wrong impression. When people hear that three of the Border counties have been moved to…

When the pandemic unemployment payment was introduced by the previous Government it was only supposed to last for 12 weeks. Obviously, we have learned since then that this pandemic is going to be with us for much longer than we thought. To make sure that we could extend it well into next year, if we have to, we had to link it to wages. That was done so that we could continue to support people's incomes. These are the types of choices Governments must make and they are not easy choices at times. When I hear the Depu…

I understand the argument Deputy Murphy is making. I can even understand, on occasion, the desire to seek to wish to blame someone for the fact that we are now experiencing a second wave of the virus. However, I do not believe the argument Deputy Murphy is making - that it is down to failures in testing and tracing - really stacks up. Let us consider Denmark, for example, a country that is doing three times as much testing as us. Guess what Denmark is experiencing? A second wave with a similar incidence of the viru…

I wish to be very clear about this because people really need to understand the public health message. We are now six or seven months into this pandemic. If a GAA player or a player of anything or anyone tests positive for this virus, the close contacts of that person must restrict their movements. People should not wait to be called or contact traced. They do not have to wait to be tested. I had to do it myself.

Once someone tests positive, the close contacts of that person must restrict their movements for 14 days, call or no call, test or no test, contact tracing or no contact tracing. That is how we contain the virus.

He was not contacted with the test result. Is that it? If there is a delay in getting a test result-----

He was not contacted with his test result. Is that correct?