Eamonn Maloney (Dublin South West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Minister for his presence for this Topical Issue. I presume he is familiar with the report carried by the UCD Geary Institute, published a week or so ago, under the title Creating Credit, Not Debt. Essentially, it is about the idea of moving towards a personal microloan scheme in Ireland. It is a very impressive blueprint and a very valuable piece of work that focuses very much on the position in which many working families find themselves as we crawl out of this recession. In some cases, nobody is working in these families and, in other cases, there may be one or two people working on low wages.

Most of us in the House are familiar with how people have been "set aside", for want of a better term, because of what happened in the recession. With many working or poorer people, access to banking institutions no longer exists and people who heretofore would have had bank accounts may not necessarily still have them. They are in a precarious position when they require some borrowing requirement, as most people do at one stage or another in life. This could be as small as €100 or as large as €1,000 or €2,000. One of the highlights of the report should be a concern for all of us, and it came about because of what happened as a result of the recession. I supported section 35 of the credit union legislation as there was a necessity for it at the time.

We all appreciate this, given the position some of the credit unions were in. However, we are now in a situation where a lot of poor people who had no access to banks find credit unions face restrictions in providing emergency loans. There is a staggering figure of 360,000 people who are borrowing from moneylenders, the highest number in the history of the State. This research presents an opportunity for the Minister and his Department. If it is not the ideal solution, it can be tweaked. We can come up with a solution that will take the poorest people away from moneylenders.

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