Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 28 February 2019
Select Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach
Estimates for Public Services 2019
Vote 1 - President's Establishment (Revised)
Vote 2 - Department of An Taoiseach (Revised)
Vote 3 - Office of the Attorney General (Revised)
Vote 4 - Central Statistics Office (Revised)
Vote 5 - Office of the Director of Public Prosecutions (Revised)
Vote 6 - Office of the Chief State Solicitor (Revised)
Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source
I think that is correct. A lot of local authorities have lost practice and have lost the corporate knowledge when it comes to building housing. What the LDA can become is a house-building semi-State that builds houses in the way the ESB builds electrical infrastructure, Gas Networks Ireland does the same in respect of gas, and so on.
On the credit union issue, I do not want to pretend to be an expert on it. I know it has been a topic of discussion before. What occurs to me, though, is that local authorities and, indeed, the Government and the LDA can borrow from the European Investment Bank, EIB, at an extremely low interest rate. We would not want to end up borrowing more expensively if we can already get loans from the EIB at a very low interest rate.
We would just need to bear in mind the safety of people's small savings in credit unions. I imagine the reason they are only allowed to invest in certain areas is because they are low risk. We all know that development finance and investing in the property sector are potentially high risk.
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