Mr. Garrett Stokes:

I apologise. Dublin is 21%, Border counties are 13%, the west is 11%, the mid-west is 8%, the south west is 10%, the south east is 17%, the mid-east is 11%, while the midlands are 9%. It is right across virtually every town and village in the country.

On the quantity of loans, it is an interesting and good point. The business has gone in the opposite direction to what people probably assumed on day 1. People did not have a desire to borrow during the recent crisis, but as the economy has settled down more and more people are looking to do so. Our volumes are growing year on year. We are up at approximately 19% this year in applications. There is an ongoing demand but, despite the banks being back in the market, the area in which they do fewest approvals is the micro-enterprise space because it is a harder area for them to do. Credit supply has definitely improved, and demand has thankfully begun to pick up. While we are playing in a smaller pool, the combination of credit supply and demand means there is a market that we will always need to feed into.

I will turn quickly to the forms. Hopefully, nobody is paying somebody for a form. The form should be simple and we do our best to make it more so. Documents are required for a loan application but it is not a long process. On the cost for jobs, the cost per job is a measure of our effectiveness. It is all of our costs and bad debts divided by the number of jobs created or sustained. That includes all of our overheads and interest paid back on loans. The person has, of course, borrowed money on top of that. A business cannot be set up for €2,000. That is the cost per job of the process we are doing.

The €25,000 limit was also mentioned. That limit is set down in the statutory instrument. Where do people go after that? This year, thankfully, a change we have achieved is that a person can now come back to us a second time. Up to earlier this year, the logic was that if people got a loan from Microfinance Ireland, they should be bankable after that. As the loans have begun to mature, the reality is that they are not. They are sustaining themselves and employing people but they are still weak businesses. We have now been allowed to do repeat business with our existing customer base. On our loan rates, our standard rate is 7.8% fixed APR. For partner referrals through the banks, LEOs and LDCs there is a 1% discount, so it is 6.8%. Our default rate is 30% all in. We have only written off 16% so far but the default rate is 30%.