David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I have given Mr. Moran a fair wind to respond because I wanted to hear his response. There seems to be agreement here that liquidity is the key issue and that small businesses need it very quickly. We have proposed 0% interest loans and cash-for-equity initiatives. There are lots of ideas out there. The real issue is that money needs to get to SMEs very quickly to pay fixed costs, keep them afloat and prevent them from withering on the vine, as a previous speaker put it. Hopefully we will see a new approach with a new Government and a new dynamic. The witnesses did a good job of identifying and highlighting the challenge.

I want to address regional development very quickly. The last time I met Mr. Moran was in one of the galleries in Waterford at the launch of the national planning framework. There was some discussion of regional development at that event. There is an awful lot of talk of regional development now because it is absent from the programme for Government and there are whole regions without Ministers. That is a different issue, however. Let us take the south east as an example because it is the area I live in. It underperforms economically and has higher levels of unemployment and lower levels of educational attainment. It does not have a university. It does not get the capital funding it needs to stimulate its economy, even for big projects. We seem to be battling all the time. What is Mr. Moran's advice to a new Government on genuinely embracing regional development?