Damien English (Meath West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

That concludes today's session. I thank both witnesses for attending. Their report was very informative and will be very useful to our discussion in the next couple of months. The report is very clear and the summary and recommendations set out the three areas on which we have to focus, namely, information, financial capability and diversity. We have argued for a long time that financial capability is quite poor in many SMEs. Many business owners and developers are quite good with their product development, but when it comes to finance, they leave it to someone else and do not get involved. We might not be in such an SME crisis if we had dealt with this before. This problem is not just to be found North and South, however, because it is to be found across Europe as well. We must work on this issue. We have many mentoring programmes but even they do not deal with the financial capability issue, which is important for a lot of decision-making. I have seen many loan applications to banks. They could not loan money on them and it is as simple as that. It was too easy during the boom time to get money and people did not have to do a proper cashflow statement. Banks have people in place now who can judge the applications. We need to ensure SMEs have people in place to put applications together. I am glad the report reinforces what we have been hearing over recent years. The report brings it all together and it will be very helpful in our discussion. We will compile our own report in the next two months which will include many of the recommendations made in the witnesses' report. I thank both witnesses for taking the time to attend. We might engage with them again at a later stage as we proceed with this.