Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 15 April 2014

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation

Access to Finance for SMEs: Bank of Ireland, Ulster Bank and AIB

4:00 pm

Mr. Brendan O'Connor:

I do not agree with the contention that the European Central Bank, ECB, has a plan to close down SMEs. In any of our dealings with the ECB, via the troika, it has all been about strategies to support SMEs and get a transmission of credit to them. Leaving aside that, we fully accept Morgan Kelly’s basic premise that one needs to separate the non-core debt from the core trading or viable debt. That is our strategy. It is not new news from our perspective. However, I did not get the point that the ECB wanted to take down SMEs.