Mr. Tim Molan:

There is considerable headroom and scope for business lending. At the minute, 0.51% of our assets are in commercial lending. We were doing commercial lending up until 2011 and 2012, and at that stage a number of restrictions were placed on credit unions. Many of those have now been lifted but not all of them. There is still considerable headroom there to do lending but we need to be realistic. If one is to engage in something such as commercial lending, one has to have the structures in place, the staffing, the risk appetites and the risk management capacity. These are not built up over night and they cannot be just plugged in and played with. In the past two years in particular, much advancement has been made in those fields, so it would be inaccurate to say that advancement is not being made. There are credit unions seriously addressing those areas which are also engaging with the Central Bank in those areas, but there is no simple plug in and play model.

Public banking, or whatever term we put on it, is not something that can just be dreamed up, plugged in and be had working tomorrow morning. There are 50 to 60 years of experience in the credit unions. We have got some things wrong but we have got many things right along the way as well. As my colleagues from the Irish League of Credit Unions, Mr. Farrell and Mr. Johnson, were saying, there are serious efforts going on behind the scenes of co-operation between the co-operatives and the credit unions to fill those gaps.

Our colleague from the Money Advice and Budgeting Service, MABS, spoke of dealing with issues such as impaired credit ratings. These are very much part and parcel of the landscape of reinvigorating Ireland, with which we have to deal with not only on a personal level but on a commercial level.