Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the representative groups and thank them for their time. I am trying to reconcile the gap between the Central Bank, the Department of Finance and the individual member of a credit union, as represented by these groups today. If I start with Consultation Paper 76 - or CP76 - my understanding was that the representative organisations made specific proposals on tiered regulation. I note the point made by Mr. Tim Molan of CUMA earlier:

Tiered regulation, proportionate to the scale and risk in each credit union, has not been delivered. This was a key deliverable of the commission report. Consultation and engagement have been less consistent and transparent than was originally envisaged ... Where consultation has been triggered, sector views have often been ignored, as was the case with CP88.

I want to drill further into that dynamic. I read the speech by the Registrar of Credit Unions to the CUMA spring conference. Objectively, one would think that, from a regulatory point of view, the issues raised by her in that speech seem to apply to many credit unions. If there are still outliers in the system that are not ticking all the regulatory boxes from a legislative point of view, should they be dealt in one parcel, while those credit unions, whether they are large or involved in the hub-and-spoke model, are allowed to progress into areas such as payment accounts, debit cards, longer term lending and investment in social housing? Is it the case that the Central Bank is trying to apply a one-size-fits-all approach? If that is the case, will that hamper the ability of the credit union movement to progress in lending for productive, social and other purposes?