Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The sectors or the customers of banks will always want more credit and want that credit available at lower interest rates. I am always conscious here of the critique of our banks regarding them not lending enough and the lending they are doing being available at too high an interest rate. All that being said, if I look at the credit demand surveys that my Department regularly publishes, all those surveys point to Irish companies and employers having a relatively low demand for credit now for many years and being quite risk averse to taking on new amounts of lending.

By and large, our banks are meeting much of the need from the Irish business sector but they are not meeting all of it. That, for example, is why we have organisations such as Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, which has a mandate to invest in more long-term and higher risk investment decisions. It is why we have the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland. It is also why we have a number of State-backed lending schemes, for example, with regard to Brexit and also during the Covid pandemic, to underpin and provide assurance to our banking system so that it is able to meet some forms of credit demand that it otherwise would not feel comfortable meeting.