Patricia Ryan (Kildare South, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the opportunity to contribute to the debate. The credit union movement has been a huge force for good across the Thirty-two Counties, in almost every small town in addition to the bigger cities. I commend the staff and volunteers of credit unions, who have been instrumental in helping individuals and small business owners to keep the show on the road throughout the pandemic. I commend the leadership on its constant development of new ways to help its members. The credit unions are rivalling the big banks with their innovation. They are offering online access to accounts. In recent weeks, they have made Google Pay and Fitbit Pay available to their customers.

We need to give the credit unions a greater role in our banking system. They are embedded in our communities and are best placed to help the local areas, of which they are an integral part.

Some small changes can be made to make this happen. Credit unions should be given greater capacity to provide mortgages. We need to legislate for a more ambitious future-proofed vision of mortgage lending. This should include a change to the current regulatory position to allow credit unions to operate a more centralised investment model that would allow them to pool their resources to develop community bank mortgages open to all members who meet the lending criteria. This would allow home loans to comprise 20% of the total credit union loan book, thereby offering a more member-friendly solution for credit unions that wish to expand their mortgage lending. This would contrast with the commercial banks, where between 55% and 75% of the loan books comprise mortgage loans.

We should utilise credit union funds to support the building of social housing. We should create a mechanism by which credit unions could invest in social housing. This would allow the credit union sector to invest up to €900 million in the provision of social housing and fund close to 6,500 badly needed new homes.

Credit unions could play a very important role in helping the country to meet its climate change targets if it were possible to provide funding for a national retrofitting programme. The Government has committed to retrofitting 500,000 homes by 2030 at an estimated cost of €5 billion. Credit unions are well-positioned to support this programme by leveraging their assets to provide funding.

We need to empower our credit unions to participate more fully in SME lending. Legislative changes will be required to ensure such sectoral lending is feasible. This would allow all credit unions that wish to participate in such lending to do so. The proposal to pool resources among credit unions also fits with the concept of a credit union-led community banking model.

This legislation is about allowing credit unions to adapt to the current pandemic. We need to ensure that our credit unions are to the forefront of this economy, rather than an afterthought.

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