Richard Bruton (Dublin North Central, Fine Gael)
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I will try to deal with those points and questions as best I can. In some instances we may be obliged to provide additional information at a later date.

In the context of the microfinance loan fund, 72 applications - with a value of €1.15 million and supporting 181 jobs - have been approved. That is the up-to-date position. The fund is obviously in a roll-out phase. I understand representatives from Microfinance Ireland may have come before the joint committee to discuss its plans. The organisation has good plans in the context of rolling out the fund and improving the level of take-up in respect of it. The fund is being administered through the county enterprise boards and we are taking an initiative with the banks in order to improve people's awareness of it.

On the temporary loan guarantee scheme, some 41 facilities - worth €4.8 million and giving rise to 245 new jobs and maintaining 115 existing jobs - have been extended.

Anything from 200 to up to more than 500 jobs would not have been supported with credit without these facilities. Therefore, they are making a significant contribution. We have the ambition to expand them and certainly we have the headroom to expand them further. We will be reviewing the credit guarantee scheme imminently. We committed to doing that within one year and we will do it.

Deputy Calleary raised the issue of projects in Dublin and the percentage outside Dublin and Cork. There is no doubt that in recent years - it has been happening for several years now - it has not been possible to hit the targets for projects outside Dublin and Cork. Part of this is driven by the types of projects we are winning. There are far more expansions than new projects. These are largely in the information technology sector and are heavily concentrated in the information technology, pharmaceutical and medical devices areas. The projects tend to go to the places where those clusters are deep and established already and this has created real difficulties in hitting the targets.

However, there have been innovations such as Connect Ireland, a new addition to our foreign direct investment enterprise. It has a far better regional spread and it is winning projects. I imagine Deputy Tóibín will have seen the project in Kells last week. It is a good fit for Kells. It is the perfect new technology project but it is using skills that were there already. Connect Ireland is a new element in this area. I hope the focus on emerging companies will get a better spread. Ultimately, we do not or cannot tell companies where to go. They tend to come with rather sophisticated views and a matrix of what they are looking for and often they have already used ratings agencies to identify where in Ireland they will get what they want. It is an area that we need to work on and it requires a continued effort. We have focused in on the south east, an area that has been a blackspot, particularly in Waterford. We hope we can get some learning experiences from there and then apply them more widely.