Small-minded view of brave Irish businesses

MAYBE it’s because so many businesses in this country town remain shut that I keep thinking of a chipper in Co Clare that I visited last autumn — which seems a lifetime ago now — where my friend enjoyed an amazing fish burger, the home-made batter courtesy of the returned emigrant owner who had worked hard to fulfil his dream of coming home.

But a few years in and the dream had become something of a nightmare.

“All I ever get from the Government are brown envelopes with harps on the front,” he said, “and letters inside where the last three lines are always a threat.”

I dread to think what his future now holds — and not just that of all such entrepreneurs but indeed of rural Ireland. Given the Irish private economy accounts for a massive three quarters of the workforce outside Dublin, where they are employed by 180,000 firms with less than 250 staff.

Like Patsy and her husband — who have run a medium-sized enterprise in a small rural town for 27 years now. She refers to their “family of 12 staff who work with us side by side. There is no divide.”

Except the one that exists in Ireland, as Eddie Hobbs noted in this paper recently, with its “ingrained suspicion against SMEs, and a preference for the wealthy foreign businesses with big chequebooks, strange names and great photo ops”.

As Patsy found out when

“on March 14 our world came crashing down” and they had to make their staff redundant. “We were able to honour their wages due to them, thank God, but this was very difficult for us.”

In stark contrast to how easy it seemed for the bank “who we have been trading with for the past seven years, running a current account with no overdraft” to deny them any support or possibility of a temporary overdraft. Because like many in the private sector, they are still being punished for the last financial crisis.

“If you have defaulted in this country for any reason, which so many people did during the recession, then you are saddled with what’s called a poor credit rating for life. This is wrong.”

Likewise, the insurance company — to whom they pay a hefty annual premium — told them “we are not covered. End of.”

Which could literally be the case, now that the Government has capped support for SMEs at €2bn — massively short of the €15bn which the National Small Business Recovery Plan said was needed to prevent the collapse of the entire sector.

“There is so much corruption in this country,” Patsy believes. “While all us small businesses obey the HSE rules and close, foreign-owned supermarkets are cleaning up. Why are they allowed to trade non-food items?”

Is it because, as Hobbs suggests, we will support “anybody but the next-door neighbour, despite the local job creation from local capital and local risk-taking”.

Now the chips are down, it’s time to back the backbone of the indigenous Irish economy.