Eamon Ryan (Dublin Bay South, Green Party) | Oireachtas source

Credit unions are very well placed and should be supported in lending small residential, retail and commercial loans while the commercial banks, from my experience, are looking for larger loan facilities in the business sector and are not well tailored or equipped for SME business loans. Yes, we have the strategic investment mechanisms the Minister put in place but they are not working on a local level. The advantage of the public banking model is that it provides a mechanism whereby local deposits are recycled in the local economy which we badly need in rural Ireland so that not all development takes place in our cities. As is the case in Germany, the public banking model brings that real experience in business lending into that gap between what the commercial banks are good at in commercial lending and what the credit unions or other local facilities are not skilled enough to do. There is a gap. Only the study will bring that out but my concern is that at the outset, the Department of Finance, having looked at it, do not see the same gap in the market. That is a concern I have.

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