Mr. Niclaus Bergmann:

Perhaps I will add something and then Seamus Maye can speak. I am packed in between two Seamuses.

Deputy Kelly talked about the Department of Finance and timelines. I like his structured approach. I fully agree with the Deputy. After all, I am German and we like structured approaches. Everything has to be in place before this really starts and things have to be sorted. As the Deputy also said, it is not about setting up one bank in one specific region; the whole system can only work if it is a nationwide system. We need the eight banks and we need the central service provider. Only then can we really come to a sustainable business model. I fully agree with what the Deputy said.

The Deputy mentioned the EIB. Der Sparkassen is also working with EIB funding in Germany. It is cheap funding for specific purposes and that is fine. Also, Mr. Harald Felzen and I had a discussion. We were in Luxembourg with the EIB. We talked to them and asked what they would think about such a local banking model for Ireland, and they were very positive about it. It will not be a big issue to have access to funding from the European Investment Bank for specific purposes, such as for loans for lending to clients. This is on our agenda also.

The Deputy asked about the impact on other banks and what impact we, der Sparkassen, have in Germany. We increase competition. When we sometimes hear the German pillar banks, such as Deutsche Bank, complaining that they do not earn enough money on retail banking, I would say that we do something right. One in Germany will probably have the lowest financing costs in all of Europe and this is because there are more choices for consumers. While looking at the number of branches, der Sparkassen has 12,000 branches in Germany. Deutsche Bank has just decided to reduce its number of branches to 500. That bank sometimes leaves the regions because in any specific region it might only have one, two or three clients with whom it wants to deal. It is not that the clients do not want to go to the bank, but that Deutsche Bank and other private commercial banks focus on specific high net-value individual clients and large corporate clients which do international business. We are there and we cover the big market. It is true that it hurts other commercial banks.

Another question the Deputy asked was what restraints we, as the savings banks foundation, have in supporting this. We have been working in Ireland for the past three years, coming here first in 2014 on a pro bonobasis. We are covering all our costs, which includes travel, accommodation, flights, etc. We can do so as long as it is in the design phase. As long as it is about setting up the model, this is the way we can continue. When the support is more intense, and more support is needed for physically setting up banks, we will have to see whether we can continue to do it on a pro bonobasis - probably not. Otherwise, it would be on a cost-covering basis, like we have been doing for the past 25 years in many countries of the world.