Mr. Seamus Maye:

The only real viable way to retain the post office network is to create a post office bank exactly on the basis of the New Zealand model. It works in New Zealand and as we are pretty well identical economies, it can work here. Anything else is just painting over the cracks. To allow the pillar banks into the post offices to capture the post office network as a potential competitor is madness.

We would be very keen that this would be looked at by Government before the announcement. A report by the joint concentration group on the viability of public and community banking has been completed but we do not know what is in it.

The credit unions cannot survive. They are being shackled by the Central Bank and Government for years and years and the restrictions that are being put on them makes them non-viable. In our view the restrictions are anti-competitive. They are breaches of Irish and European competition law. We believe the Sparkassen can help but we also believe we have the basic infrastructure between the post offices and the credit unions to create an alternative to the pillar banking system.

Let us not forget that in Ireland the pillar banks have in and around 95% of the market. In Germany, the equivalent pillar banks have 12.5% of the market. There is something seriously wrong with the banking service in our economy. In one of the appendices I gave some figures on the German economy, which are quite fascinating because we all think that Germany is about Volkswagen, Mercedes Benz and Deutsche Bank, but in fact it is not, it is all about small business and micro enterprises.