Dr. Mark Cassidy:

I thank the Deputy. Let me deal with those three issues in turn. The first question highlights a clear gap in terms of people's experience during the crisis. For those people who have not been directly affected by any income losses, what they have generally experienced is a significant increase in their savings, largely because they have not had the opportunities to spend because outlets have been closed down and, in fact, in the past year savings have increased by around €15 billion. We think there is now a significant stock of savings that will be important in terms of supporting the recovery when it happens. On the other hand, there are many sectors of the economy very negatively affected, particularly those reliant on face-to-face contact, such as hospitality, large parts of retail and arts and entertainment.

The Deputy asked about the analysis of this. We have done something on this and we published it last year. First, the losses have been significantly mitigated by the effect of the Government supports, such as the employment wage subsidy scheme, EWSS. Given that, for most of these small enterprises, wages represent a very large amount of their costs, this has reduced the potential cost. At the same time, they also have significant non-wage costs and many SMEs have experienced losses on those. Our estimates are that SMEs last year would have experienced overall losses of roughly between €10 billion and €12 billion, which is very significant. We think the Government measures had a significant effect but the other estimate that we have published is that, even allowing for the supports, close to 15%, or just over one sixth of SMEs, are unlikely to have the financial capacity to meet their liabilities during 2021.

Essentially, bringing all of that together, while the Government supports have had a significant effect, significant losses have been incurred by many SMEs, including many viable SMEs and many SMEs which came into this crisis in a good financial position. However, if they are closed for 12 months of the year, of course, they are going to incur losses. Those are the estimates that we have.