Dr. Eoin Magennis:

I will touch on the first question about the lack of information on lending in Northern Ireland. Not knowing how much the banks were lending to businesses in general and small and medium-sized enterprises in particular has been seen as a major hole in policy-making for several years. Basically, the approach we took was to use the same methods for the research that have been used by the Central Bank here to get information from the banks directly. We asked what their stock of lending was, what their new lending was, the numbers of applications and so forth. To give them their dues, the banks co-operated. In a sense it was a slow process because they were not used to being asked for that information. Previously, what had happened - it continues to happen - was that the Northern Ireland banks gave information to the British Bankers Association as a whole. Now, after several years of back and forth with the British Bankers' Association it looks as if the association is close enough to releasing regional figures for the North and these will give a better picture.

One thing the British Bankers Association needs to be pushed on a little further is to strip out financial intermediation and real estate from the lending to give a picture of real economy lending. That would produce something directly comparable not only to the Central Bank data but data available throughout the European Union. We would be comparing like with like, as we have done in this report. Suffice it to say the unavailability of that data until relatively recently has been an issue and a source of great frustration to policy-makers and politicians in the North. However, because we managed to get the data, it has put a little push on getting this data from the British Bankers Association, and not before time.