I move:
That the Joint Committee on Small Businesses shall be empowered to take evidence in public and to include with any report which it may make minutes of such evidence.
Electoral (Amendment) Bill, 1983. - Joint Committee on Small Business: Motion.
There are so few opportunities to comment on committees that I hope you will bear with me on this occasion. It is desirable that the committee should be empowered to take evidence and to report on the evidence they take from the public. I was surprised to learn from a member of the committee that small business have been defined as including any business that has 100 employees or fewer. If this is correct, it is a very broad definition of small businesses because it includes almost every business in the State. I raise this matter because when we decide to set up a committee we should have a fairly accurate idea of what the focus of that committee will be and the title of the committee would not lead me, as a non-member of that committee, to consider that it was going to so enlarge their scope that it would consider businesses which must include practically all the Irish-owned businesses in the State and a very wide number of businesses. Therefore, would it be possible for us to consider how this may affect the capacity of the committee to report in due course?
I am a member of the Joint Committee on Small Businesses and we feel that this committee should be empowered to take evidence in public with a view to including minutes of evidence in any subsequent report which we submit. This is a very important committee and, while they may appear to have a very wide scope, if you compare the position with most European businesses they consider that a firm employing 400 people is a small business. In our dimension by defining a small business as one which employs under 100 people we will be including many areas, rural and urban, where small businesses are encountering so many difficulties. It is vital that we take evidence from the relevant agencies, banking and managerial systems. It is also vitally important that many submissions being heard by this committee should be taken in public. I fully endorse and support the motion that we adopt this procedure in the House.
This motion specifically empowers the committee to take evidence. I am not a member of the committee but their terms of reference were "to examine and report to each House of the Oireachtas their recommendations on the following matters"— and one of "the following matters" was to consider a common definition of small businesses having regard to the criteria applied by State agencies to the small firms association of the CII and definitions used by other EEC countries. It is for the committee to define "small business" and as soon as they make that decision and report back to the House we will have an opportunity to debate whether that was the correct interpretation.
Question put and agreed to.