Mr. Ed Farrell:

During the CP88 campaign, the three representative bodies present today had a meeting with the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and his officials and some positive things were achieved before the legislation was signed out of law and into regulations, at midnight on that day at the end of 2015. We have had a couple of meetings with his officials since then, such as one nearly a year ago on social housing at the time of the formation of the current Government. A lot of action and work were promised and the Department of Finance, the Department of the Environment and the Central Bank were engaged to push on with social housing following requests by Independent Deputies who were in talks about the formation of a Government at the time. Despite the urgency of that time and meetings of those three bodies with the credit union movement, almost a year later no credit union money is being put to use for social housing. Since then the Central Bank has said that consultation would have to be done in any event and that, even if it wanted to, it could take between six and 21 months to change the rules.

Each of the representative bodies meet the Central Bank on a regular basis, though we do not meet the Department of Finance as regularly as we should or would like to. We pushed very hard for the Minister and the Government not to take the rules out of the legislation because we feared the Central Bank would be more rigid once the rules were taken away from the control of the Oireachtas. During the work of the commission in 2011 and 2012, the thinking was that the rules would be less rigid because they would not require Acts of the Oireachtas to change small operational details relating to credit unions. However, it is actually more straitjacketed now.