Niall Blaney (Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the leadership shown by the Minister of State on this issue. As many speakers have noted, the past ten years or so have been very tough in terms of banking in this country. There are still many people in this country who have been burned as a result of banks holding fire sales of loans and selling them to vulture funds. This left many couples across this island in no man's land and they are still there today. It is an awful tragedy but it is another day's work, so I will not go into it now.

Credit unions are community-based initiatives. Other speakers are certainly correct in saying they were not the cause of the crash. They are trusted financial organisations that are embedded in communities throughout this country and we need to do everything we can to ensure they are protected and to help them to grow. They are not banks and do not want to become banks. They want to use banking technology services to provide not-for-profit co-operative financial services to their members across all communities on the island.

We want to enable the credit union movement to grow. Without a change in the legislation or regulations, there will be little change. We need to see appropriate balance, consistent regulation and the levelling of the playing field with banks and post offices. The supervision and relentless restrictive regulation are suffocating. We want to see the policy framework strengthen credit unions' long-term viability. Fees are crippling credit unions. Regarding reducing capital requirements, the 10% minimum reserve is totally inappropriate, unnecessary and unrelated to risk. This also applies to long-term lending of five to ten years. We look forward to the Minister of State's proposals and making credit unions much more viable and giving them a safer future.