Jim Power: SME sector must be at heart of government policy
Of the total number of enterprises in the Irish economy in 2019, SMEs accounted for 99.73%. Picture: iStock
For some years Kinsale-based accountant Cormac Fitzgerald and myself have lamented the lack of coverage and understanding of the Small and Medium Enterprise (SME) sector in Ireland.
Most attention tends to focus on the multi-national sector, and a lot less attention and support is devoted to the hundreds of thousands of disparate small businesses that generate so much economic activity and employment throughout the countryside. We sought to remedy this by collaborating over the past year to take a more detailed look at the sector in terms of its economic contribution; its characteristics; its behaviour, particularly during the Covid-19 crisis; the issues it faces; and the support that the sector should be given in order to ensure that the sector can expand and flourish, and become a more important and stable segment of the economy.
