Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein)

Credit comprises one of the four pillars of a properly functioning enterprise sector, in addition to keeping costs down, ensuring there is not over-regulation and that regulation is fair, and ensuring demand. Demand is extremely important. Credit in this State is dysfunctional, for a number of reasons. The primary reason is that the troika dictates that the banks must have accelerated deleveraging from the market, which means they will reduce their exposure over the longer and shorter term to small businesses. The Government has produced a number of schemes that should help small businesses. We applaud them but there is a major difference between the proportion of the problem and the proportion of the response.

A problem we highlighted an Committee Stage when dealing with legislation in this area concerned many of the schemes of the Government. The interest rate charged to businesses reduces their ability to service loans or to make a profit on loans.

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