Gerard Craughwell (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the Minister to the House. It is the first time I have addressed him since this Government was formed. I welcome the reopening of the country as it is happening in a clear, managed way. The calm manner in which the Minister has dealt with questions on live media over the past 12 months about the state of the economy and the damage Covid is doing to it has been remarkable. It encourages a certain amount of confidence in people and helps them to relax. I congratulate the Minister on that.

We are talking about banks today. When I was growing up, the only time I ever saw my father wear a suit was when he was going to a funeral or to the bank. I remember my first encounter with the bank as a young corporal buying my first house in Galway. I remember how the bank manager bent over backwards to do everything to help me. Ten years later, when I had run a business into the ground and lost everything I owned, that same bank manager held my hand as we walked through a liquidation process. In the end, his bank took my house but at least I was able to talk to him. I remember the day I told him I was broke. He sat me down, ordered coffee and biscuits and asked how we were going to solve the problem.

I heard previous speakers talk about banks being about the community. They are not; they are about shareholders now. The community no longer has a place. The banks will do what their shareholders need them to do. I pity people like the Minister who has to deal with these people. We saw in 2008 how they lied through their teeth about the state of the economy and their own balance sheets. They lied through their teeth and made the citizens of this country pay for the banks' recklessness. We talk about competition but I do not want to see the competition we had in the crazy mid-1990s right up to the mid-2000s again. I do not want to see banks coming into this country to suck the life and soul out of taxpayers and the hard-working people of this country. I want the Minister to control the system as best he can.

While it is bad that we are now down to three banks in this country and competition will be limited, what is even worse are the limitations we are putting on credit unions. I was recently told that the maximum amount that can be held in credit union savings now stands at €30,000. People living in rural Ireland who do not have access to a local bank branch may have access to a credit union.We need to give the credit unions more space. I heard my colleague, Senator Kyne, speaking about the Sparkasse system. We need to look at that a little more carefully to see where we are going in respect of community banking. I have been to Germany and have looked at some of the community banking systems there and how they have been involved in the development of infrastructure in the cities, not just in the provision of personal loans and mortgages. They have provided infrastructure and seed capital for factories and have been involved in every aspect of community. That is what we need in this country.

I am at an age when I have been using and teaching technology for all of 25 years before I came in here. It still amuses me when I ring my bank and I am asked to press "1" for this and "2" for that, and to key in then my membership, account number or personal access PIN. You go through all of these steps eventually to get a machine that will say it will provide a new password for your Internet banking account. You never get to talk to a human being any more. Where are the bank managers who used to have human empathy and are going to help the small businesses of this country get back on their feet and who have been crucified over the past 12 months, albeit the Government has supported them well? They now need their banks to step up to the plate to support them for the rest of the time. We need a change of view and, as my colleague, Senator Burke, said, we need the Central Bank to be a little bit less academic and a little more human in its approach.

Senator Burke also mentioned personal contract plans, PCPs. I wonder is that the next bubble we are waiting to burst, and if it does, where will that land our economy?

I congratulate the Minister on what he is doing and I look forward to seeing him work us out of this Covid-19 disaster.