Mr. D?nal Traynor:

We are very much in a demand-led business. We will never say "no" and are always looking for ways to say "yes" to organisations regardless of whether they are urban or rural. As I said earlier, we have the benefit that we are able to operate across both jurisdictions - both urban and rural - and work with grants such as sports capital, Social Entrepreneurs Ireland, SEI, Fisheries Local Action Group, FLAG and, indeed, philanthropists like Tomar Trust, Rethink Ireland, etc. We have a lot of experience in that area.

I get what the Deputy has said. One can see from the geographic spread of our loan finance over the past 20 years that the vast majority of it will have been in rural areas, and smaller urban concentration spots like the Ballinas of this world. Let us consider Dublin and one might ask how well aware people are that social finance exists. Then, considering human capital, one asks what level of resources do they have on the ground so that they would have the capacity to submit applications to various grant funders, and then one can look at the transient nature of the communities themselves. I might be in a rural football club in County Cavan, and have grown up with those lads since they were three and four years of age so I almost know what they are going to say to me in the dressing room, but if people are playing for a different type of sports club in a very urban area one might never have seen a person before and that person may not come into the club next week. That is the basis on which grant applications are going to be based. It is about awareness, human capacity and the repayment capacity linked to their buying into the ambition of that particular organisation. If a person has not been there long enough then their ambition might wane.