Mr. Des Carville:

I am not aware of any constraints coming from the Department of Finance. We are very open and we engage with all the stakeholders regularly. To return to tiered regulation, we have no fundamental difficulty with tiered regulation. The Central Bank, which is the regulator and is responsible for regulation, is open to tiered regulation and has stated as much on a number of occasions. The Deputy's question moved on to social housing. We have seen proposals from the two representative bodies, the Irish League of Credit Unions, ILCU, and the Credit Union Development Association, CUDA, and have had several meeting with those representative bodies and with the Central Bank. We are supportive. We have had plenty of correspondence with the ILCU, in particular, on the topic. However, these are commercial arrangements between credit unions, not the representative bodies, and approved housing bodies. It is up to the credit unions and the approved housing bodies. It is hard to see where we fit into a commercial arrangement between such entities.