Aideen Hayden (Labour) | Oireachtas source

It was professional indemnity insurance. This morning there was an issue raised about the procurement of books for libraries, for example. Some of the requirements put Irish SMEs entirely out of the frame. This has been done by setting nonsense requirements that they could not possibly meet. We have to be very conscious when we start looking at so-called value for money that we do not remove value for society on another level. I ask the Minister to look at SME procurement requirements and, in particular, State requests for tenders.

With regard to non-performing loans, the good news is that the most recent statistics show that the number of mortgages in arrears for more than 90 days has decreased. A lot of the data have put a cloud over some of the issues that we need to address. One of them is that we have a major problem, not only with access to finance for the SME sector, but access to finance for middle and lower income households. The banking sector does not want to know middle to lower income households. We will have to look seriously and realistically at what we are going to do about introducing some type of third banking force into this country or looking to the local authorities within the context of mortgage finance for low income families.

We should look at the threats facing the economy when we look at some of these issues. In particular, I alert the committee to the warning made by the Central Bank today that housing and the strategic issues we have around housing are becoming a major structural threat to the improvement we have seen in the economy.