Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Tuesday, 23 October 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Finance, Public Expenditure and Reform, and Taoiseach

Report on Local Public Banking: Discussion

1:30 pm

Mr. Ed Sibley:

To be honest, I am not entirely clear on what the committee wanted to hear from us. Having looked at the report, clearly there is a question of what one would do in terms of authorising, which is where we would have responsibility here. There is clearly a concern in the system around SME lending, so that is why we talked about SMEs. There are clearly connections with the credit union sector. In five minutes, which was my instruction, I tried to cover the areas that I thought intersected, in terms of Central Bank responsibilities with the topic that the committee wanted to discuss. That is basically the driver behind my opening statement.