Mairead Farrell (Galway West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis na finnéithe as teacht os comhair an choiste. I also have to go to another meeting so unfortunately my time might be a bit limited but I will try to get as much as I can out of it.

I noticed in her opening statement that Dr. Doorley mentioned it is a well-established fact that small firms face different challenges from larger enterprises when it comes to credit access. She also discussed the need to encourage equity investment for SMEs to wean themselves off debt financing. The commission has outlined certain tax measures, such as the EIIS. If we look back at the time of the Celtic tiger, one of the most successful indigenous exports to emerge from that era was software, and that was due in no small part to the then State-owned ICC Bank as a significant equity investor at the time. It was privatised but we have other banks in which we have significant ownership.

When we look at countries that pursued successful industrial policies, like Taiwan, Japan and South Korea, they set credit quotas for their banks and they required them to allocate certain parts of their SME loan books for lending related to a given industrial policy. That might be microchips, for example. That stood out to me from Dr. Doorley's opening statement and I wonder if that is something that could be done here. Could such a measure be set here or could tax measures be used for similar purposes? I notice what Mr. Coffey said about research and development and all that as well but one of the things that came up when I was meeting different businesses around budget time was the issue of small businesses finding it difficult to take the next step.