Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I think it will be 1,000 this year and 1,000 next year but, to be honest, this is trying to prime the pump and encourage people to think in those terms.

In regard to retail, I was in a provincial town recently where a number of people are interested on a commercial basis. Someone is looking at having a collective for the town. That is being done by way of a private initiative and we are not putting money behind it. However, we are trying to move businesses from having a presence online to actively trading online, and we are targeting businesses to go that extra distance. Many of them will have a presence but will not actively trade. I think this will be huge. One can see it already. People are buying their clothes in a different way. I believe that in future retail will carry less stock and will use online trading tools. People will still go into a shop to try things on and to look at the range of things but it will be a different model. I think we have to get people to think in this vein, and we have been working on that.

The specific changes to the credit guarantee scheme are around all of the criteria, although I do not have them with me. We will have to introduce them legislatively, so they will be coming before the House. They are changes to the level of guarantee. Where there is a package of loans, it will be about how much risk we take on it. It will relate to the charge the banks make. In discussions with practitioners, we have identified a suite of changes. I suppose those on the Opposition benches will say they told us so. Obviously we got approval for a certain approach, but it can do more than it is doing and we will bring forward legislation to do that.

We have changed some of the terms for the micro-finance scheme, such as not requiring a refusal, to make it easier. We have had meetings with the banks to try to ensure that where refusals go out, micro-finance is plugged with banks. There is scope for more. The LEOs will be in place as a first-stop shop and as agents for micro-finance, and we hope we will drive take-up. If one looks at the county take-up, one will see that some counties have simply not bought into it at all. Obviously, we will focus on those.