David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I appreciate that the SBCI gave us a very detailed response but it did not answer all the questions we asked. We asked for a county-by-county breakdown of jobs that have been created. What we got was a breakdown of loans by county. When the SBCI wrote to us several months ago, it stated that it supported 148,000 jobs. This letter states: "it is difficult to make a direct link between an individual SME taking out an SBCI loan or leasing product and that same SME creating a specific new job or maintaining a specific job that would otherwise have been lost."

The Chairman spoke about a glossy figure. The SBCI put out an earlier statement in a letter to us claiming to support 148,000 jobs, but under a bit of scrutiny that does not seem to be the case. The SBCI cannot tell us how many jobs it has actually supported. This raises a question about value for money. Is the SBCI just supporting loans that would have been offered anyway? Its remit is to support job creation. Can we reply to this correspondence? The SBCI refers to jobs supported. What does it mean by that? We could also ask for a breakdown of the numbers by region or county.