Mr. John A. Moran:

We would have loved if the programme for Government had simply accepted our programme and worked it through, as all the firms and business representatives have done. I recognise, having been a Secretary General, the difficulties presented by politics and how it comes into this. I took great comfort from the fact that when we started this conversation and launched this programme, SMEs were not being talked about. We see now in the programme for Government a significant acknowledgement of the importance of SMEs. There is also an important line in the programme, which I assume meant that people did not know how much or what would be required yet, where it states the Government will consider providing much more grant aid for firms. We are taking that to mean that, hopefully, people in the Department of Finance and Central Bank are hard at work trying to work out the scale of the damage to SMEs in order to decide how to do this. We think it could be as much as €6 billion. Schemes that allow for €2,000 to be provided to businesses are simply not enough. It is important that we know what the damage has been. If we can work out the extent of it, whether it is €5 billion, €6 billion or €7 billion - whatever the right number is - we have to work out a way to recapitalise firms to allow them to recover from that loss. I reiterate that giving €6 billion of loans that people have to repay over the next six years is not going to be the solution.