More competition needed in our banking duopoly: Noonan
GREATER competition in the Irish banking sector is needed, according to former finance minister Michael Noonan.
Mr Noonan said there was currently a duopoly in the banking sector in Ireland and that more European banks should be encouraged.
“I think we have to encourage competition in the banking sector, we invested a lot to recapitalise the banks.
“It’s a kind of duopoly now; you go away from Bank of Ireland and AIB, there are not that many lenders who will lend serious money to investors,” he said.
He was speaking at the Historical Society in Trinity College, Dublin, where he was presented with the society’s Gold Medal for Outstanding Contribution to Public Discourse.
Mr Noonan went on to say that, while almost every sector in the economy had been corrected, the hardest sector to fix was the construction sector.
The sector had been severely damaged and had become “the scapegoat sector of the economy”.
“It was very hard to get confidence into that sector of the economy to allow people to start building,” he said.
“Where the small builders got wiped out it still hasn’t recovered and not enough houses are being built.”
Mr Noonan said Ireland’s economy was now entirely different from what it was in the Celtic Tiger days, when the whole economy was being built on construction.
Bubble
Now employment in the country is being based on a real economy, and not on a “bubble economy”, the former Fine Gael leader said.
He also paid tribute to his former government colleagues in the Labour party, describing them as “patriotic people” that had got very little thanks from the electorate for the contribution they made while in government.
On Ireland’s position in Europe, Mr Noonan said that it was very important to get a progressive Paris-Berlin axis going again.
“Europe’s future is not by isolation, not by doing what the UK has done and opting out, Europe’s future is further integration,” he added.