Mr. Neil McDonnell:

The problem for the small business sector is that among all the trade associations our penetration into the total small and medium sized enterprise, SME, market is a decimal point. If we represented 40,000 of a 250,000 businesses, we would be doing well and we tend to have the bigger companies. There is, therefore, a difficulty in getting anything like that suggested by the Senator to happen. There is also a difficulty in getting our members who have these debt issues to come forward at a time when we can do something about it. When we get into that long grass with a fund we will require the services of people like Mr. Kissane because we will be dealing with this on a case-by-case basis. It is very difficult to present a united front among many small businesses. Many of the matters I deal with involve complicated debt structures, for example, a small business that has a family home or farm land or outbuildings or mobile assets that are part of a deal in a cross-guarantee on another functioning business or another illiquid business. If people saw down the road to what would happen to them with some of the types of guarantees they entered into, they probably would not get into them in the first place. It can be extremely difficult to resolve those.