Fintan Warfield (Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister. I met departmental officials this morning to discuss digital archiving on the web. It was a productive meeting. I encourage the Minister to give urgency to that issue. A number of Senators have talked about the sectors that may benefit from this Bill. The EIF introduced a loan guarantee fund for the creative and cultural sector. The Minister will be aware that the sector has been constrained in its ambitions and growth potential by the unavailability of debt finance. In Ireland, the sector is almost entirely reliant on State funding for projects of limited scale. To address this across Europe, the European Commission, through Creative Europe, provided €121 million for a cultural and creative sector guarantee fund, managed by the EIF on behalf of the Commission. The fund targets microbusinesses and SMEs by acting as insurance to financial intermediaries such as banks or credit unions. To date, financial intermediaries have been approved in Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Spain, Italy and Romania. In December of last year, the fund had enabled loans of €130 million across those countries. In her new role, will the Minister call on Irish banks, community lenders, or credit unions to make expressions of interest to the EIF as financial intermediaries with the intention of generating access to loans for creative and cultural SMEs in Ireland? I would appreciate it if the Minister could shed any light on whether financial intermediaries are in discussion with the EIF about.