Richard O'Donoghue (Limerick County, Independent) | Oireachtas source

When the funding was being made available for Covid-19 supports, the Government announced the five pillar banks through which it would send out the funding. It never mentioned the credit unions. I mentioned this to Ministers when the five pillar banks were mentioned. Like other speakers, I am a credit union member. The credit union and the post office are the last two banking systems in Ireland that have people behind the counter who know you by name. You are not known by number there. You walk into your local credit union, you know the staff behind the counter and they say, "Hello, Richard. How are you? How was your day?". The banking institutions, however, have all gone online. Let us tap this and tap that. If you ring them up, you are asked for your account number and, no matter where you are calling from, you could be talking to somebody from Dublin through a banking system. The one banking sector that has stood alongside us through Covid, the only people who stood by us through Covid, when the banks turned around and said, "We will extend your loans but you will still have to pay off your interest within the term", and the only ones who made concessions to us were the credit unions. They turned around and said they would extend loan terms and they extended them but they did not do as the banks did. The banks extended loans by three or four months but told customers that if they had a five-year loan, they still had to pay off that loan within the five years. This meant that when things picked up the customers had to pay more, even though we were in an economic crisis because of Covid. The credit unions turned around and said, "We will give you the three, four or five months but we will add it onto your loan and give you the break now that you do not have to pay for two or three months."

The other factor that has to be taken into account here is that the legislation that comes down through the credit unions from central banks and so on is over the top. Did the Minister of State know that the boards of all these credit unions are made up of volunteers? They are local people in local communities who have volunteered to go on those boards to look after the parishes, towns and villages around them. They are all volunteers. Everyone in the top tier of the banking sector, however, takes the cream off the top and gives nothing back, taking the big money at the top. The volunteers who run our credit unions, however, are local people who know where the local funding has to go back in. If the Minister of State does anything, he needs to help the credit unions so they can come back and give the funding to the householders who want to build at an affordable rate. The central banks are making it far too hard for them while they compete with the present banking system.

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