Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

The SBCI’s goal is to increase the availability of appropriately priced, flexible funding to viable Irish SMEs, including agricultural firms. By the end of March 2018, there had been €972 million of SBCI-supported lending, supporting more than 24,000 SMEs and 129,000 jobs. The SMEs that received SBCI finance are from all sectors of the economy with 26% of loans going to the agriculture sector. The SBCI has a number of schemes in place specifically designed to support lending to the agriculture sector.

By the end of March, 7,842 loans totalling €203 million had been made to farmers under the agricultural investment loan scheme. This scheme continues to be available through Fexco and Finance Ireland. Finance Ireland has also teamed up with Glanbia to provide finance for the installation of on-premises milk tanks by dairy farmers.

In January 2017, the SBCI launched a €150 million agriculture cashflow support loan scheme for farmers, on behalf of the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine, to provide low-cost, flexible loans to farmers to support the primary agriculture sector in dealing with income and price volatility. The scheme provided unsecured loans of up to €150,000 for up to six years at an interest rate of 2.95%. The fund was fully subscribed by April 2017. By the end of December 2017, some €145 million of loans had been drawn down by more than 4,000 SMEs supporting 5,800 jobs under the scheme.

The scheme was supported by €11 million of EU exceptional adjustment aid and further €14 million from the Department of Agriculture, Food and the Marine.

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