Michael Healy-Rae (Kerry, Independent) | Oireachtas source

They are not loaning money. I am thinking of a nice respectable family, a young couple starting out or a young individual, perhaps between 20 years old and 30 years old, deciding to go to the bank to see if it might be possible to get a loan for a business or a mortgage. Those people are all wasting their time because nothing is being done to help them. All we see are the fancy advertisements on the television, in the newspapers and on the windows of the banks asking people to call in because they are lending. Those banks are not lending. They might be lending to millionaires and big businesses. Perhaps that is why at the end of the year it is possible for them to state that they backed different industries with so many hundreds of millions or billions of euro.

All I know is that from the point of view of the ordinary person, the people we represent, the banks are not lending. I condemn what the Government has done. There have been calls for many years from myself and others - including people like Tom O'Callaghan of the Independent Postmasters Group of Ireland - for the introduction of proper community banking. When I refer to community banking, I mean banking where any profits accrued go back into rural communities, as they do in similar models around the world. It was a sensible proposition and there was nothing wrong with it. Did the Government support it? No, it did not. It went around the houses in every possible way. It went around the dresser and the kitchen table to avoid supporting it and came up with every suggestion in the world except what we wanted.

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