Dear Member,   

In this week's e-zine, we bring you details of an ECJ ruling that employers can ban staff from wearing Islamic headscarf and other religious symbols.

Each week in the SFA e-zine, we will profile a different government support available to small businesses, in this edition we focus on the Prompt Payment Code, a voluntary code of practice for businesses committed to paying suppliers on time.

We link to the new Brexit SME scorecard from Enterprise Ireland and the NCC report on benchmarking competitiveness between Ireland and the UK.

Don't miss out on the next SFA webinar on 20 April on disciplinary and dismissal and Business Bytes on 10 May, focusing on how to take control of your business costs. Find details of an AHECS event on small firms, start-ups and entrepreneurship on 27 April. We have announced some of the speaker line-up for the SFA Annual Conference, Better than Best, on 24 May in the RDS you can also still take advantage of the early bird 2 for 1 ticket offer. 

Note a change of date in the project management course which is now running on  28 April. We also provide a summary of recent press coverage. 

As always, we’d love to hear from you about any queries you may have, issues you wish to have raised with Government or other stakeholders and your ideas on how we can improve the business environment for us all. Please contact me directly at tel: 01 605 1602 or e-mail: patricia.callan@sfa.ie or tweet: @SFA_Irl or visit: www.sfa.ie.

Kind Regards, 

Patricia Callan 

SFA Director