Timmy Dooley (Clare, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. I was at another committee, but I am familiar with what they require and very supportive of it. It seem to be a relatively straightforward requirement. The demands of credit union members are changing and the credit unions are responding. The difference between them and a bank is that their principal requirement is to serve their customers. At the end of the day the bank is ultimately about serving the shareholders, which is a completely different subset of individuals within the overall mix. I fail to understand why the Government would not respond in a more favourable way and recognise where the credit union is coming from as a not-for-profit organisation.

There are a couple of things that follow from this. Diversification can only reduce risk. The more a product offering or investment strategy is diversified, the safer the overall standpoint has to be. If the demand for the credit union's product mix is changing, its investment strategy would have to change in line with that. However the customer might view the product, the people who have to provide the funding behind it need an investment strategy, exactly as Mr. Johnson has said. I disagree with my colleague who has left in respect of the size of the investment and the nature of the money. The credit unions are not looking at this purely from the point of view of having a lot of cash washing around. That does not reflect where they are at. We must recognise that the credit unions have a changed environment, with changed demands from the customers. There are opportunities there and the credit unions can provide competitive products, and rightly so. If they sit on their hands and continue to provide the same products they will become insolvent over time and irrelevant.

Taking all that into consideration, it is a compelling case that will have to be addressed over time. There is a unique opportunity now that we have come through the banking apocalypse, as it were. The credit unions are starting from a completely different point. There is definitely a need for competition within the lending sector. We all know about that from the number of representations we get from constituents on an ongoing basis. We regularly refer people to the credit union. Some lost touch with the credit union during better times when money was being doled out like confetti. They are now re-engaging.

From my experience in assisting constituents, they are getting a very fair hearing, whatever their credit rating might be. The credit union's community structure is far more intuitive in terms of understanding risk, in contrast to the way in which the pillar banks have gone. A lot of the assessment is at a remove and online, and there is an awful lot less personal interaction. The credit unions maintain that, which gives them a better capacity to profile the risk of the individuals within their membership base.