Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I too am glad to get a chance to speak on this. It is interesting that we are discussing companies and corporate business when we have seen over the decades what has happened in corporate governance and the lack of it. We could refer to the children's hospital or umpteen cases of poor corporate governance. I have to declare an interest in that I am a director of a small business that employs 25 people. The excessive regulations and the weight on small companies is just unbelievable. I know that everyone has to keep within the guidelines and within the law, and every small company wants to do that and does that, but any person who does not pay their taxes gets hit with huge Revenue bills, savage interest - penal interest, I would say - and penalties. RTÉ, however, whose accounts and bogus self-employment we have been discussing, has a €15 million fund put away in anticipation of a settlement with Revenue for wrongly classifying employees. You could call it fraud. It is very serious. No small business gets that leniency from the Revenue, and this is a big bugbear of mine. Deputy Collins mentioned the whole situation of small businesses closing. They are disappearing before our eyes, and it is because of too much corporate governance and too much interference from Big Brother. It is unbelievable. I do not know what this legislation will do for it, but we have to cop ourselves on. We are being tied up in bureaucracy. There are more new statutory instruments and new regulations coming out all the time, and many of them have been lobbied for by, I do not know, non-governmental organisations and everybody else. I do not know who dreams them up but they are making it extremely difficult for small businesses to continue. Small businesses are the backbone of any community in rural areas and villages and every place else. They are the real backbone. We should have agencies out there. We have the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA, which visits different hotels and companies and comes in at 12 o'clock at night. There is a different pay rate from midnight onwards. NERA might come in only at 12.05 a.m. What we need is for it to be redirected to go into businesses and say, "We are here from the Department of enterprise and we want to know if there is any way we can assist you in your company or if there is anything you want to talk about." Who consults and goes to talk to businesses and gives them a listening ear? That is what NERA should be doing but it is not. It is all stick and no carrot. Ordinary people want to work and create employment and businesspeople want to create employment, but if we do not cop on to the over-regulation and the excessive interference, we will smother and cloak every business in the country. It is a wake-up call and it has been going on for yonks.

I will not say much more on it tonight but I am just making the point that we need supports, not restraints, encumbrance, overzealous regulation and so on. That is the situation, as far as I see it.

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