Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

One of the major breaks on this economy is debt overhang and the ability to access credit. It is one of the reasons we in Sinn Féin have insisted time and again that stimulus by the Government is necessary. In other words, when private investment is paralysed, the State must invest. There is no doubt in my mind that the Government will come around to that view but the issue is how long it will take it to do that and the damage that will be done in the interim.

It is important to state that the Government has given a number of responses with regard to credit but we should examine the size of the problem. The Minister has put €64 billion of our money into the banks. Fiona Muldoon from the Central Bank of Ireland has stated that 50% of €58 billion of impaired debt is due to the small and medium enterprise, SME, sector. If construction is taken out of that, we are talking about at least €8 billion, or 35%, of SME debt which is impaired. It is impossible for those healthy businesses to survive. Spicers in Navan, for example, had a functioning business, a product that would sell and a customer base but, unfortunately, it had diversified into property and the entire business was sunk.

We have asked the Government time and again to deal with this issue through the banks, the organisations that got the money, but it has refused to do that. It has brought forward a number of smaller projects and funds which make up €200,000 here and €2 million there but do not come near the billions of euro hampering this economy. What has the Minister done to get the Economic Management Group to go to the banks to get this issue resolved?

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