108. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment the steps he is taking to support small and medium enterprises facing rising costs of doing business, including energy, insurance and regulatory costs; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [64579/25]

Sentiment score: 0.20

SMEs and self-employed individuals are being crippled by the cost of doing business in Ireland in 2026. The Government is ignoring their pleas for help and rejecting every Sinn Féin proposal to alleviate their situation from our motion to tackle insurance costs to our motion to bring energy costs. I ask the Minister to outline the concrete steps his Department is taking to support these businesses struggling with the cost of doing business.

Sentiment score: -0.08

How come the business owners I speak to every day of the week are struggling so much if the Minister is saying that so much is being done for them, as measured through the CSO's wholesale price index? That is not the reality on the ground. It is certainly not the reality in the businesses that I see every day. The SMEs are the backbone of employment in towns and villages right across this State. They keep main streets alive. They sponsor local teams, provide apprenticeships and take chances on new staff. Too many of them are telling me the very same thing, which is that they are working harder for less. The SMEs need Government intervention that matches the scale of the problem. That could be it, that the scale of the problem is not recognised. Over the past year, the Government has talked a lot about supports but what SMEs have experienced is delay, piecemeal measures and a refusal to tackle the big drivers of cost. The signs are there. In 2025, a total of 848 insolvencies were recorded. That is hundreds of businesses that did not make it through the year.

Sentiment score: -0.05

Then how come there are 848 insolvencies? That does not add up in terms of the supports for small business. I recognise that there are increased costs in wages but we cannot have a situation where workers are subsidising businesses. That is why the proposal for a PRSI rebate was put forward in our pre-budget submission to mitigate those costs, but the Minister did not take that up. Behind every insolvency is a livelihood and a community hit. On energy, Ireland is simply not competitive. Eurostat data shows that Ireland had among the highest electricity prices in the EU for non-household consumers in 2025. That is devastating for cafés, shops, small manufacturers and tourism businesses trying to plan month to month. On the insurance, the rip-off continues. Premiums remain stubbornly high. SMEs are being hammered by public and employer liability costs. Overall, Ireland ranks among the top countries in the world for insurance premiums per capita, which tells us something about how expensive the overall system is.

Sentiment score: -0.01

110. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment to outline the measures his Department plans to introduce to correct the imbalance in unemployment rates between regional areas and urban centres; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2418/26]

Sentiment score: -0.14

What does the Minister plan to introduce to correct the imbalance in unemployment rates between the regional areas, particularly the north and western regional area, and the urban centres? Despite the song and dance the Department and the Taoiseach made today over the strong overall employment statistics for the State as a whole last year, recent figures have revealed a growing imbalance between the unemployment levels in the urban centres and unemployment in regional areas. Will he outline the measures his Department will take to address this?

Sentiment score: -0.21

Let us look at the figures. They are not mine, obviously; they those of the CSO, backed up by reports produced by the Northern and Western Regional Assembly, whose work in this regard I acknowledge. It is very important for us to know the picture. On regional unemployment, the CSO states that the State's overall figure for unemployment at the end of quarter 3 of 2025 was 5.3%. The northern and western region, which incorporates the five counties of Connacht, including that in which the Minister of State and I live, as well as Donegal, Monaghan and Cavan, had the highest regional unemployment rate in the country, at 6.1%. This region has been categorised by the EU as a lagging region, well behind Ireland's other two regions, which have a GDP per capita that is almost three times higher. Most worryingly, if we drill down further, just looking at the unemployment rate for the west, which includes our county, Mayo, we see the rate was as high as 6.7%. That is over 25% higher than the figure for the State as a whole.

Sentiment score: -0.13

In that case, why are so many people moving to Canada, Australia and Great Britain? It just does not add up. If they had jobs and a place to live, they would be staying at home. The Government’s enterprise support structure and investment and skills programmes remain disproportionately concentrated in already prosperous areas, while towns and rural regions struggle to attract sustainable employment. We need concrete action from the Government to attract and retain employers in regions with persistently high unemployment. We need to ensure the IDA Ireland and Enterprise Ireland strategies have a genuine regional impact. We need to align education and training programmes with the local labour market needs and to support SMEs, which are the backbone of regional economies. Warm words and strategies are no longer enough. Regional unemployment requires targeted, measurable and time-bound interventions. We cannot ignore the figures that are in front of us.

Sentiment score: 0.18

112. Deputy Rose Conway-Walsh asked the Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment to outline the specific North-South tourism initiatives included in the Government’s new tourism strategy; how these initiatives will support the growth of sustainable all-island tourism; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [2419/26]

Sentiment score: 0.22

We are all aware that the Good Friday Agreement established tourism on the island of Ireland as a key North-South co-operation area, and it markets the island as a single destination for visitors. Will the Minister outline initiatives in the Government’s new tourism strategy that aim to grow sustainable, all-island tourism on a North-South basis? My concern is that the plan will leave parts of our island behind, particularly the Six Counties, and that we are not maximising the potential there.

Sentiment score: 0.23

While I am happy to finally see a regional focus on the Government's latest tourism policy document, which aims to grow sustainable tourism in historically overlooked regions, I fear that we have missed an opportunity to integrate successful tourism campaigns from both jurisdictions. Ireland's Hidden Heartlands, for example, only recently expanded to include a fraction of County Fermanagh. While I welcome that, it could be further expanded into mid-Ulster to offer visitors a unique experience across both sides of the Border and bring much-needed footfall and spending to rural towns and villages there. Another missed opportunity was the potential to join the Wild Atlantic Way to the Causeway Coastal Route. Marketing co-operation alone is not enough. We need a Government-led vision that links infrastructure, transport, heritage and regional development to a coherent North-South tourism strategy. We want our visitors to experience the best of what the island of Ireland has to offer, all in one trip.

Sentiment score: 0.32

I welcome the work that has been done in that area, but I want to encourage more of it, and I want to encourage it to go beyond the marketing. In particular, tourists travelling North and South still face poor public transport options. If I tried to get public transport from Mayo to Belfast, it would take me hours upon hours, and I would nearly be in New York by the time I would be in Belfast. There is much to do there. Other issues are the disjointed visitor information and the lack of integrated ticketing for travel passes. There are some basic things that we can get right. The continued neglect of rail links, greenways and co-ordinated transport planning undermines the potential of the natural pairings of the campaigns that I mentioned earlier, such as the Wild Atlantic Way and the Causeway Coast Route. There is a lot more to be done in this area. Structures such as the North South Ministerial Council are underused when it comes to tourism co-operation with real economic impact. I believe that is where the future growth of our island will be.

Sentiment score: -0.02