Ms Adrienne Murray:

I will answer some of the Senator's questions. On the question of the geographic spread of applications we have applications from every county in Ireland at this point. There is still one county from which, unfortunately, we have not as yet approved a loan. Some applications are more robust and more well prepared. The assistance of their CEBs is obvious. We see a noticeable difference when assistance is provided by CEBs to applicants in the preparation of business plans and cash-flow projections, when that mentoring assistance is in place. As regards the spread of applications among sectors, that is a result of the demand in the market place and there are a lot of retailers and food producers. We are trying to get a pure geographic spread reflected in the number of applications. We are a very young business and we are trying to shape the model and the process as we go along. We are fine-tuning the application process. In recent weeks we had a meeting with the Minister and with the SME banks in attendance. The Minister asked us to bring along a concrete proposal on how the banks could help microfinance further. We firmly believe that there is an opportunity to get to the heart of the reasons applications are declined by the banks. Instead of going through another process with MFI we propose that the banks would refer those applications they have declined to MFI with the consent of the applicants. We are proposing a small pilot scheme of this process over the coming months and we are hopeful that we will see good results.