Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

In the House last November I stated the Government's view that finance was the lifeblood of every business and, in particular, was essential for working capital and in feeding investment, expansion, growth and job creation. The Government has focused on all of these elements in the past five years and the results are now being seen the length and breadth of the country. In 2012 the Government introduced legislation dealing with credit guarantees to free up access to finance at a very difficult time for small and medium enterprises, SMEs. It kept the operation of the scheme under review. The review process pointed to the need for reform and to expand the scheme. The Bill will do this by extending credit guarantees to govern non-traditional or non-bank sources of finance such as lessors, factors, invoice discounters and others. There will also be a rebalancing of the risk elements between the State and the extended pool of finance providers to make the scheme a more attractive proposition for the latter. The Minister will be empowered to give new counter-guarantees to promotional financial institutions such as the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland designed to facilitate and enhance risk sharing between all finance providers and access to available EU funding.

This legislation, in particular those aspects which facilitate the leveraging of EU funding, will significantly benefit firms, employees, SMEs and the economy at large. It will lead to the generation of jobs and the achievement of the targets we set out in our ten-year enterprise strategy, Enterprise 2025, and the Action Plan for Jobs 2016 which we launched this week. This will help us to achieve our objectives for jobs growth and exports.

I thank all Members for their help in passing the Bill and their contributions during its passage. It is a major contribution to the well-being of citizens and the economy.

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