Mr. Seamus Maye:

I have a couple of clarifications on the most recent questions. The public banking forum's proposal was put before the Department of Finance in March last. We included in the model the possibility of the credit unions and the post offices taking part in this new system. We should not forget that in Ireland the pillar banks currently have 95% of the market. In Germany, the pillar banks have 12.5%. We should not exclude from the conversation this morning the possibility of the post offices setting up their own model based on the Kiwibank model. The Kiwibank was set up in 2002.

It has 20% of the market in New Zealand. Even if we were to have another entrant into the market, such as the post offices, to take 20%, there would still be a huge gap in the market for what we are talking about here with public banking. The Public Banking Forum would fully endorse the Sparkassen. The credit unions can form a huge part of this but they cannot do it without the input from the Sparkassen people. They do not have the expertise. It is a no-brainer.

In respect of the overall funding model and the housing crisis, the Public Banking Forum believes that a variant on our model could be put in place to fund distressed house and business mortgages. We have all heard that money is available at as little as 0% on the Continent. We believe that by using a special purpose vehicle and the fraction reserved lending system, we can put a very significant fund in place to deal with distressed mortgages and distressed business loans.