Mr. Seamus Maye:

Many of the questions and comments were parallel. The figure of €170 million was taken by the Department took from one submission from the Sparkasse people. Our submission did not look for State money. It did provide the option of using State money. To put things in perspective, the Strategic Banking Corporation of Ireland, with which we dealt fairly extensively in our last letter to the committee, has a budget of €1.25 billion and has not gone anywhere near achieving its aims and objectives nor can it because it is simply a non-lender. In Germany, the Sparkasse bank is over 200 years old, has withstood two world wars and several financial crises and has never had a bailout or received a penny of taxpayers' money. The reason is very simple. It does not engage in speculative lending. It lends to the productive economy. We must not confuse this. What happened in Ireland was that our pillar banks abandoned the fractional reserve system and entered an orgy of credit creation which could only finish in one place, namely, a big bang so we are not talking about setting up a bank that can go bust. Banks that are run properly and diligently do not go bust. Would our Kiwibank-style post office bank repay €170 million or €70 million? Yes, of course it would and in a very short period of time.

It is very important that we do not leave out the credit unions. The Public Banking Forum of Ireland has worked very hard with the credit unions and the post office movement from the outset. Members must understand that the pillar banks in Ireland have 95% of the market whereas in Germany, it is 12.5% so there is room for our Kiwibank to take up 20% of the market just as it has done in New Zealand and there is still room for our credit unions or community bank to take another 25% to 30% of the market. This would still leave our pillar banks with a market share that would be far too high at over 50%. The restrictions that successive Governments and the Central Bank have put on credit unions are anti-competitive. They cannot and do not comply with Irish or European competition law. While we are at it, why not take the shackles off the credit unions as well because we have an indigenous economy to worry about? That is what we are looking for. It is not the nitty-gritty of how much it will cost because we all agree that whatever it might cost is peanuts. For the sake of driving this economy, bringing our young people back and opening up all these new industries where we have researched what we can do, we need to drive the Kiwibank, model the post offices on Kiwibank and bring the credit unions on board.