Mr. Des Gunning:

The instrument that could be used is section 44 of the Credit Union Act 1997. That section allows any credit union, at its own discretion, to establish a special fund and such a special fund may be applied to a number of prescribed purposes, including community development. To give some background information on this, I lived in London in the early 1980s and I joined a credit union the week I moved back to Ireland. I have been a credit union member ever since, for almost 30 years. I have been a teller, a volunteer supervisor and stood for election to boards. Therefore, I am an active credit union member. I wrote a paper on the matter in 1993. I was searching at the time for a local investment clause in credit union legislation and I was very happy in 1997 when the Credit Union Act included a local investment clause but it is an enabling clause and not a mandatory clause. I was very disappointed in the 15 years since then that the clause has not been used. One credit union, namely Tullamore Credit Union, has created a fund and I was involved in that process in 1999 but, to the best of my knowledge, it has not used it. I am looking to the committee and the Oireachtas to find a way to encourage credit unions to apply the section 44 process to create special funds.

The Oireachtas has an instrument available to it in the matter of tax expenditures. All credit unions gain from tax expenditures, even credit unions that serve relatively small numbers of relatively affluent people. By virtue of being organised as a credit union, they gain from tax expenditures. The gain that credit unions get from tax expenditures has not been quantified on either side. The lack of information on that is regrettable and it would be better if it were quantified. There should be a trade off between the State and the credit union movement or the application of tax expenditures to continue in return for something on local investment.