Lorraine Higgins (Labour)

I welcome the Minister to the House and commend the Government's swift and decisive action on tackling the jobs crisis. A number of essential practical measures will help businesses to create jobs in this and subsequent years. I particularly welcome measures to help the SME sector to get better access to credit, which has been a major problem. Last year, 1,900 companies went to the wall or into liquidation as a result of finance not flowing into them. That is not taking into consideration the partnerships and sole traders that went to the wall.

While we are doing well with foreign direct investment, we need to protect our own companies by ensuring that they can access such finance. The Minister for Finance has earmarked €3.5 billion worth of funding to be made available to the SME sector. However, we must be mindful of a practice that has been established in banks which are withdrawing overdrafts and turning them into term loans, thus letting them masquerade as new lending. We need to put a halt to that. I respectfully submit to the Minister that we should focus on draw-down figures as opposed to the numbers of people getting loans.

The Minister should urgently initiate the strategic investment bank, which could concentrate on high-end start-ups of indigenous Irish companies.