I welcome the Minister of State. I come from County Wicklow, which has been at the heart of forestry. It has been a huge and integral part of our economy, but more than that, generations of families have earned their living from forestry for decades. This legislation cannot come quickly enough. The forestry industry is in crisis. The Minister of State was in Shillelagh last week, in the None-So-Hardy nurseries, and she saw the work they are doing there. It was devastating to see on RTÉ the other night a whole refri…

The issue I wish to raise relates to a number of Departments. I refer to the local property tax. We are in a year when all family and household incomes have suffered a negative impact due to Covid-19, yet we are asking local authority members to increase the property tax, thereby increasing the burden on those same households.

That could have been avoided if previous Governments had addressed the two fundamental issues of the revaluation process and the fact that the property tax was not paid on new homes that were built, thus increasing the burden on the owners of existing properties. I accept that dealing with this issue is now in the programme for Government, but regretfully, legislation is required to deal with the revaluation and bringing new properties into the net. What does not need legislation and is in the programme for Governm…

I ask the Leader to request that the Minister for Housing, Planning and Local Government come before us in September. That request has been made by a number of other Senators in order to discuss social and affordable housing and the homeless crisis. The issue I wish to raise comprises two interconnected aspects. One of these relates to the county development plan process, which every county council is undergoing, and the impact the national planning framework and the regional plans are having on our councillors. I …

I welcome the Minister of State to the House. I was wondering how I would address this Bill so I will speak from my personal experience as somebody who is in business and currently going through this process. The tourism sector has faced many challenges over a number of decades. The big one we all remember was in 1969 when the Troubles in the North started. They had a seismic impact on the overseas market in Ireland because it more or less shut down overnight. It took us nearly 20 years, until the Good Friday Agree…

As an employer in one of the sectors that has been referred to, I can understand the sentiment being expressed. However, we are in a crisis and we need to respond to that crisis very quickly. Trying to enter into collective bargaining before one would qualify for the wage subsidy scheme could put businesses at risk. It is not by our choice that people in my industry offer part-time and short-term working conditions. That is the way the industry is. We simply cannot afford to have full-time workers on a permanent ba…

Workers' rights are protected in primary legislation and every employer must comply with that legislation. It is not true, therefore, that workers have no rights in the workplace. In all my time as an employer, I have tried to do the best by my employees. I used the joint labour committee, JLC, arrangements for numerous years, until the collapse of those arrangements. I actually found it quite useful for hotels outside Dublin to use the JLC process. However, there is now primary legislation protecting employees' ri…

I thank the Cathaoirleach. My issue is directed towards the Minister for Communications, Climate Action and Environment and relates to the Protecting Uplands and Rural Environments, PURE, project in County Wicklow. It is nice to see the Acting Leader here today because he would be aware of this project in Wicklow. The PURE project, which seeks to protect the uplands and the rural environment, is an environmental project that was set up to deal with illegal dumping in the Wicklow and Dublin mountains. It was establi…

I too congratulate the Minister on her appointment. The sector has never faced a crisis of such magnitude, and we have been through a number of them. In the Minister's words, the devastation being experienced in the sector is unprecedented. I welcome the July stimulus package, which addresses some of the short-term measures required to keep our doors open in the coming off-season, but the sector believes that the rhetoric from the Government is just rhetoric and that the sector is not a primary focus of the Governm…

Wicklow is open for business. If anyone would like to come to Wicklow, given that everyone else mentioned their counties, they are all welcome to the garden county.

I thank Senator Crowe for sharing his time and wish him the best of luck. He opened his doors last night for the fist time in four months, and I opened mine about a month ago. We are living examples. We are both living through this so we have a full understanding of the huge benefit this credit guarantee scheme can bring. I welcome it. It is the largest guarantee scheme in the history of the State and will hopefully facilitate low-cost borrowings through products, overdrafts, term loans and working capital. That is…

On the area of the guarantee, the big game-changer is that the State is now backing these loans to 80%. A lot of the SMEs have been through a horrendous time with the banking industry. There is very little trust between the SME sector and the banking sector. The banks were offering the SME sector millions of euro in 2008 and 2009 but would not even give them a €50,000 overdraft in 2011 or 2012 when they needed it to survive. The banks asked the SMEs to put their own pension schemes on the line and to put their chil…

I congratulate my colleague, Deputy Fleming, on his appointment as Minister of State with responsibility for financial services, credit unions and insurance. His background in accountancy, chairmanship of the Committee of Public Accounts and experience as spokesman on public expenditure and reform before that mean he is ideally placed to deal with the issues ahead of us. One of the key objectives, as the Minister of State knows, concerns how we use the credit union movement to be part of the solution of our social …

The reality of the survival of the tourism industry has become more apparent and more clear to me since we reopened our doors a week ago. When we think of the tourism industry, sometimes we just think of hotels, pubs and restaurants but the industry has a much wider impact than that on society. I refer to the transport sector. We have airports, ferry ports and taxis while limousine hire will probably not do any business for the next year and a half because there will be no corporate business, be it domestic or, ind…

I congratulate the Minister of State on his new appointment. I welcome the Bill. The SME sector was probably the sector hardest hit by the last crash. As we know, most SMEs are small family-owned businesses with a few employees. They suffered the most. There was no back-up support or social welfare for them when their businesses closed. They had nothing to hang onto. When they went to banks, the doors were closed. Just a couple of years previously, the banks had been throwing money at them. There was no funding to …

Can I give you my congratulations, a Chathaoirligh, on your success of being elected Cathaoirleach today. It is a huge honour for you and for your family. As previous speakers have said, I too know you going back as far as 2006 to that famous strategy of yours to win a Seanad seat in 2007. Some of us have tried to replicate parts of the campaign that you ran then. I had my final meeting with you in 2007 on that famous night in my own hotel, at the pheasant pluckers' ball, when you hung around for nearly two and a h…