Mr. Des Gunning:

I will back-track slightly. I am happy that Mr. Michael Morley, the chairman of the board, has taken time to attend this afternoon. The dormant accounts board made two submissions on this matter, one to the Minister on the Dormant Accounts Act, and one to the Commission on Credit Unions. The dormant accounts board said that a credit union should quantify its dormant balances, report on them and then decide either to put them into a section 44 fund locally or remit them to the dormant accounts board. Personally, I support the dormant accounts board. I suggest to the committee that is what each credit union would be empowered and challenged to do. Credit unions have been enabled to put funds into a section 44 fund for the past 15 years but they have not done so. In the eight years after the section 44 provision was enacted, as Mr. Brendan Logue gave evidence to an Oireachtas committee in May 2010, credit unions got very much involved in investing in exotic financial instruments, perpetual bonds, instruments that yielded losses something exceeding 100%. It is a pity that happened in the eight years after the provision was made for a local investment clause and there was no local investment whatsoever. That must inform the approach taken in this regard. Where there are dormant balances I emphasise that they would be better applied to some local development use outside of the credit union itself.

I have a quote from Séamus P. MacEoin, whom I consider to be a sort of intellectual pillar around whom the credit union idea took shape in this country from 1951 to 1956. Before we had any credit unions he was sculpting the idea out of the notions of Alphonse Desjardins and Raiffeisen. One of Séamus P. MacEoin's final legacies to the movement was to drive the adoption by the Irish League of Credit Unions of a set of operating principles. To quote briefly:

The credit union vision of social justice extends to both the individual members and to the larger community in which they work and reside. The credit union ideal is to extend services to all who need and can use it. Every person is either a member or a potential member and appropriately part of the credit union sphere of interest and concern. Decisions should be taken with full regard to the interests of the broader community within which the credit union and its members reside.

That is an operating principle but it is very difficult to travel around this country and look at magnificent credit union premises and have it clear and manifest that the credit union within those doors is operating that particular principle as a priority. The opportunity is there and that is why I make this submission on the widening of the dormant accounts fund and a greater focus on creating special funds under section 44 at local level.