Kevin Humphreys (Labour)
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I probably have a slightly historical insight into this. There have been incredible successes with CIB and MABS. Without the active support of CIB we would not have had microloans from the credit union and we would not have gone into the Court Services. Mr. Clarke pointed to his relationship with the Longford court house, but we had to put in place an agreement on a national basis to get back into the courts and that was done as overarching thing. There was a local and a national approach. Everybody I have dealt with in regard to CIB, MABS, microloans or otherwise had the one intention which was to try to improve the service. There was no attempt to seize power; there was nothing like that. As a Minister of State, I might have had disagreements with people I worked with but I never questioned their commitment to improve the service.

I refer to the local advisory board. What is CIB talking about? What would MABS see as that local advisory board? On the process itself, Senator Higgins has raised the inbuilt majority of CIB in regard to the process. It would be interesting to know how many times that came to a vote and how many times CIB used its majority.

On the set up and the different sets of figures, I do not think anyone has entered this process to try to save money. It is not a money saving exercise. I do not think previous Governments set this up as a money saving exercise, so it would be interesting if MABS could share its figures and do a proper analysis of those figures. If anything the intention was the provision of more money into the service.

In many ways, we have probably become very politically correct and our response to every crisis in a service, whether it is in the charity sector or otherwise, is to raise the bar of reporting which affects everyone. I am a volunteer in another national group where we are now putting three strands into one. We are putting three sections into one committee because the reporting standards are so high that the volunteers are taking more time to reach the standard than actually doing the work they volunteered to do, which is frustrating.

It is frustrating because they had a connection. The process has worked well as people can see the overall vision.

As I have said on many occasions, my wife worked for MABS. The work she carried out for MABS with the local credit union was the single payment and sharing out the money. Some money went to the ESB bill and some went elsewhere. That has grown and changed to an extent where MABS has changed and is very different in different locations. Some MABS advisers' time is taken up working with mortgage arrears rather than arrears on the ESB bill.

The credit union movement has greatly changed, and there is the question of how we are going to interact with that credit union movement. My local credit union was the Sandymount Credit Union but it is now the Dundrum Credit Union, with about four or five different credit unions coming in to make up that. We are dealing with a bigger entity. Some are more like a credit union movement and some have grown to the same size as small banks. There will be a different relationship with those and how that relationship is managed.