Credit where credit is long due

As a volunteer director on the board of my credit union for 12 years, I am responding to Mary Shanahan (Letters, Oct 4) who wrote of a Credit Union system that has lost its values. I’d like to reassure Mary that the reality is different.

A volunteer-led, member-driven, not-for-profit co-operative rooted in the local community, as pioneered by Nora Herlihy, and others, in the 1950s, is still the ideal of credit unions. This is borne out by the trust that members have in their credit unions, despite the worst global financial crash in recent history. Credit unions were the last port of call for people who couldn’t get credit from the banks. Today, they have become the only port of call in communities that have been abandoned by the banks, which made vast profits from those communities.

Unfortunately, a small number of credit unions were swept along in the fervour of the Celtic Tiger’s roar and suffered large financial losses.