Financing Irish SMEs: The Case for Alternative Means of Finance

The purpose of the thesis is to investigate whether Irish SMEs relay heavily on bank finance as an external means of finance. In addition it seeks to determine whether there is adequate use of alternative means of finance by Irish SMEs. A five-year period data (2015 - 2019) was collected from the ECB European Commission’s SAFE survey was collected and analysed using the one way ANOVA methodology and the two sample T-test to compare the use of each source of finance by Irish SMEs with France Spain Italy Netherlands and Belgium. The findings suggest that there is no evidence that Irish SMEs rely heavily on bank finance. Furthermore Irish SMEs use of other alternative means of finance are neither high nor low. Though it was found that the use of leasing and hire-purchase was quite low when compared to SMEs in the EU.