Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú) | Oireachtas source

Gabhaim buíochas leis an Aire as teacht isteach chun an méid atá laistigh den tuarascáil sin a phlé. The country finds itself in a new banking crisis at present. My major frustration with this is the fact that Bank of Ireland and AIB can function in the manner in which they are functioning because they operate in an unbelievably uncompetitive banking market. The major threat to customers, small businesses, farmers and regional and rural Ireland is the wholesale absence of competition in the Irish market. That has happened largely because previous Governments and the former Minister, Michael Noonan, created a two-pillar banking system, in part to protect the value of those banks. What that has done is create a duopoly. As anybody who does leaving certificate economics can explain, that duopoly means there is enormous supplier power in the hands of those two banks. As a result, they can control all aspects of engagement between themselves and the customers. They can do what they like to the customers because the customers have absolutely nowhere else to go. One must either do business with those two banks or start bartering. That is the market that exists.

I listened to the Minister and Deputy Durkan with regard to not wanting to direct these banks to take particular actions. If I was in government, I would not want to direct those banks in certain actions. What I would do is create a competitive market, a market in which those banks lose their supplier power and there are competitor banks put into place, such as a stakeholder public banking system, and in which far more banking power is given to the post offices and the credit unions. My worry with regard to credit unions is that I have listened to ten years of platitudes in Leinster House when it comes to credit unions, how wonderful they are and how they should be doing more, but very little extra support is being given to them to enable them to achieve more. Indeed, I met the regulator of the credit unions a number of years ago, who basically communicated to me that the Government did not trust the credit unions to have the management infrastructure to be able to provide a proper banking alternative in this country. The thing to do in that scenario is to buttress that management infrastructure so they can provide that system within the banking market.

Ireland is moving into an uncompetitive space for banks. That is the reason Ulster Bank left. It left on the basis of a financial decision. It was as pure and simple as that. The reason is that banks in Ireland have to hold two and a half times as much capital on mortgages as their European peers, and interest rates are not providing income streams to banks. Does the Government have a significant plan to introduce competition in the banking sector to make it attractive for a stakeholder public banking system? Does it have a plan for the post offices and the credit unions and to make them more attractive to European competitors?