Tommy Broughan (Dublin Bay North, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am delighted to have the opportunity to contribute briefly on the Industrial and Provident (Amendment) Bill brought before us by my Independents 4 Change colleagues and I. It is a long overdue Bill that will amend the Industrial and Provident Societies Act 1893 in important respects, as my colleagues have outlined, and provide for connecting matters.

A co-operative by definition is an autonomous association of persons united to meet common economic, social, and cultural goals. They achieve their objectives through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise. Co-operative movements emerged after the industrial revolution because of the upheavals and very bad treatment that workers and producers of that era endured. In England, people such as Robert Owen and enterprises such as the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers were notable. In Europe, Raiffeisen Banks emerged as co-operative credit providers in response to restrictive credit conditions.

As my colleagues have outlined, Ireland has a long history of co-operative effort under the leadership of Sir Horace Plunkett, R. A. Anderson, Fr. Finlay and others. The Irish co-ops thrived from the 1890s and we are proud of our history, through the decades. My colleague has said, of course, that some of these co-ops later morphed into public liability companies, plcs. Some of the responsibility for that lies with the Minister of State because he and the Government have not come forward with modernising legislation because his party did not want to and neither did Fianna Fáil. They did not want to support the co-operative movement. Deputies Connolly and Pringle also mentioned the famous Fr. James McDyer and the Comharchumann na nOileán. We have a proud tradition in this area, going right back.

Co-operative financial services have also been successful in Ireland with the establishing of the credit union movement. It came to this country from the United States through the great John Hume, who started the first one in Derry. They began to develop all around the country. The Government's attitude to co-operative development was shown to some extent in the crash era in how it dealt with credit unions and building societies. For no good reason, the then Minister for Finance, the late Brian Lenihan, backed the Educational Building Society, for example, which was owned by its depositors, including my family, into Allied Irish Banks. Similarly with the credit unions, a quarter of a billion euro was put forward because credit unions were going to collapse but he never said, of course, that only €14 million or €15 million was used. Fine Gael's attitude to credit unions and the co-operatively owned financial sector has always been a bad and unsupportive one.

We welcome the fact that the Progressive Credit Union in my own constituency is about to launch a current account with a debit card, chequebook and so on. That is a valuable development although it could have happened 30 years ago. It did not happen because Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael were not prepared to bring in the legislation to make it possible.

We are all familiar with the development co-ops in Europe. We still wonder why the Sparkassen bank has not been allowed or encouraged to come into this country. I hear Deputy Michael McGrath asking, week in, week out, why we are paying 4% interest rates when the rest of Europe is paying 1%. Why is that the case? One of the reasons is that Sparkassen and other groups like that have not been encouraged.

We are familiar with co-op housing and the National Association of Building Co-Operatives, NABCO, and various other approved housing bodies which operate on a co-operative basis. There are small streets in my constituency which were built by a group of teachers, nurses and other people working together who actually created their own housing.

The Minister of State is also very familiar with the group water schemes programme. Horace Plunkett was from the Minister of State's own constituency in Dunsany.

Co-operatives are a powerful tradition in our country and it seems that, in the interim period, and particularly following the horrible years of grotesque capitalism under Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, we have totally neglected this sector.

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