Peter Mathews (Dublin South, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to make a short contribution to this debate. I recognise, acknowledge and commend the contributions of the two previous speakers who are my colleagues. The credit unions have provided for the community a co-operative and mutual approach to savings and borrowings which has been invaluable. The Bill will provide a framework which has been well discussed and researched and is appropriate to the conditions that obtain in the wake of the the financial meltdown which has affected the entire economy.

I use the opportunity to read an email I received from a constituent because it sets out the context and the inter-relationship where credit unions provide money, where the banks have failed in their objectives in recent years and where we are now trying to negotiate a restructuring and recalibration of the entire financial system in this country, to include a writing down of debt in order that households and families can get on with normal business and normal life. The email is headed, "I voted for you but you have gone missing".

It states:

Dear Peter, the above [a link to the article referring to the €650,000 pension tab for the chief executive of bailed-out bank Bank of Ireland] is in today's paper. You stood on my doorstep during the election campaign, when I raised issues such as the above with you, you said things would be different under a [new] Fine Gael led Government after the protracted period of failure following successive Fianna Fáil administrations. Things aren't different - if anything they're worse [as a result of the legacy].

At 46, I have a meeting next Monday morning in Germany to take up a job in Chile (that's 18 hours' flight from Paris). I will leave my wife and 3 children but must do it in order to support them. This is the second time. I emigrated in 1988 after I finished University and was away for 10 years.

This country fails its sons and daughters because our elected leaders look after themselves and/or vested interests to the exclusion of those who are not on the inside. I will be an immigrant again as will many thousands of other Irish men and women when the commemorations of the 1916 rising take place in 2016. My grandfather fought in that rising, that's how close it is in time. What have we achieved in the intervening years?

Parnell stated "no man has the right to fix the boundary of a nation. No man has the right to say to his country, "Thus far shalt thou go and no further", and we have never attempted to fix the "ne plus ultra" to the progress of Ireland’s nationhood, and we never shall.

I was born in 1966, when celebrations took place to commemorate 50 years since the rising. In the intervening years we have made progress in education, in industry and in the development of our infrastructure. We [now] have 440,000 people unemployed but we can pay 6 figure pensions from current account funds to failed bankers in their fifties to pay them to walk the dog. We borrow the money to sustain the current account,ergo we borrow the money to pay the bankers that broke the banks and the economy while our young people emigrate taking the future of this country with them.

Time to find a statesman. We haven't had one for some time.

Yours sincerely,

[The constituent.]

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