Mr. Séamas Ó Muilleaneoir:

I am delighted to get that question because it is something that must be clarified. Within the next two weeks we will publish a paper on this issue and how we suggest it should be done. The committee will receive a copy of that as part of this debate. It is almost due to be printed but there are a few i's to be dotted and t's to be crossed. It is ready. It is a comprehensive and valuable document.

The Deputy asked fundamental questions and he can respond if I do not answer the exact question he asked. Fundamental to this issue is the matter of credit and the role of credit unions. Credit union, by definition, is something of an oxymoron. Technically, credit unions lend money from their deposits, whereas banks facilitate credit creation which is a very different issue. That critical element must be understood. Take the example of the €7.5 billion or €8 billion in excess deposits that credit unions have. If the credit unions were to deploy that into ten community banks and worked on the principle of the German Sparkassen, they could create a loan book of approximately €40 billion almost overnight. That would fund many things. Likewise, there was money in the pension funds and €7.9 billion of that was handed over to Ireland Strategic Investment Fund, ISIF. I believe that was a very wrong use of those funds. They could have been used on the basic principle of the German Sparkassen. Between the credit unions and that fund of €7 billion, a loan book of €90 billion could have been created which could have solved a range of issues in debt write down and could have supported a range of new businesses. That cannot happen overnight, as it must be allowed to develop, but the potential that exists is enormous.

Nobody can say that there is no room in this economy for credit. There is plenty of room, and there is also the clout to create it. That clout must be put back into the communities, because the credit unions are not allowed to use it. What has been done with the ISIF funds is utterly wrong. One of the suggestions made to us by the Germans is that we bracket the lending in the community banks. They suggested that the credit unions would continue to lend in the bracket up to €20,000, give or take a little, that the community banks would lend from that figure to perhaps €500,000 or €600,000 and that a further entity would be created to lend from that bracket to €10 million. Not many of the latter would be required. However, the gap at the upper end is being filled at present by the ISIF funds and the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, SBCI. They are just institutions lending out real money, whereas credit could be used to manage all of that if we understood and managed the credit. Does that answer the Deputy's question?