Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats)
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79. To ask the Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment the totality of the funds requested and drawn down by his Department from EU sources in respect of covid-19 in each of the years 2020 to 2023 and to date in 2024, in tabular form (details supplied). [30220/24]

Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael)
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As the Deputy will appreciate, the response to the scale of the challenge posed by the advent of Covid -19 involved the whole of Government Departments, including my own Department who rolled out a panoply of targeted supports to assist businesses impacted by the affects of the pandemic.

These supports included discrete schemes such as the Restart and the Restart Plus Grants, the Sustaining Enterprise Fund, the Covid Life Products Scheme, the Covid Credit Guarantee Scheme etc. In addition, the Department refashioned a number of existing enterprise supports, including access to finance measures such as the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland administered Working Capital and Future Growth Loan Schemes, the Microfinance Ireland Covid Loans, Trading on Line Vouchers etc to assist business to deal with the impacts of Covid.

In the main the funding for these once off Covid measures were provided to my Department’s Vote through the relevant Revised Estimates processes as voted on by the Dáil rather than from EU sources.

Insofar as EU sources are concerned, the NextGenerationEU package as adopted by the EU Council in July 2020, was essentially Europe’s shared response to the severe health and economic crisis caused by COVID-19. Ireland’s element of this response was articulated through its National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP). The Plan identified a set of 16 investments and 9 reform commitments which were focused on delivering sustainable, equitable, green and digital recovery.

My Department was assigned responsibility for managing two of these investments, namely the Acceleration of the Decarbonisation of the Enterprise Sector and Driving the Digital Transformation of Enterprise in Ireland, and funding of €140 million was allocated in the NRRP to deliver on these investments over the lifetime of the Plan. As at the end of 2023, a total of €12.4 million was drawn down to support particular projects approved in respect of the aforementioned investments. Further projects to deliver on these investments continue to be assessed and are expected to be approved within the lifetime of the NRRP.