 We're now checking at 12.33 and we're live in Movil today and we're showing Credit Union as Jingle mentioned here for the first anniversary of the merger for Alibaba and Crown Credit Unions and also to Mark International Credit Union Day. To tell us a little bit more about the movement of the chairperson on the board of directors here that's Paul Brogan. Paul, welcome to our studio and thanks for taking a bit of time out. I noticed earlier, you might think that the Credit Union is in everything far from it. It's worldwide. Yeah, thanks John and thanks for having me here. Yeah, the Credit Union is a worldwide movement and today is the International Credit Union Day. It's like the Holy Day or a bank holiday for Credit Unions all over the world. It's a day to make a bit of noise about the Credit Union. A day to thank everybody for being members of Credit Union and to put the word out there that Credit Unions are there. They're there for members. They're member owned. And some of the Credit Unions now in other parts of the world are very small. They could be in areas like Sierra Leone, Sudan, where they don't have the same world with all that's what we have here. So they are in bite need of Credit Unions out there. But the same principle applies. It's a community coming together for the community. Yeah, the idea initially was that, you know, everybody pulled in a little bit of their savings and the less well off members who back in 40, 50, 60 years ago, they went to the local Credit Union as a member and they borrowed a little bit of money for maybe for an oil bill or for a roof repair. And they paid a little bit extra than what they bought, which meant that there was a little bit of interest made. And that interest made help with the overheads, help with paying staff, help with anything else that was needed. And what was left at the end of it was given back to the members. So the members owned the Credit Union. There's 25,000 members in the Shown Credit Union, which is the amalgamation of Carandona and Boncranha initially. And then Vol joined us a year ago and we changed the name to Anishom, because that's the era we live on. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a sizable membership. That's not to say that you can't have more members than they're always welcome. Yeah, like we do have probably a lot saturated, but at the same time, there's a lot of young ones getting born. There's a lot of new people coming into the area. So, you know, I was just thinking on the way down here today, it would be great if somebody joins when they're born, saves a little to the right team, borrow from the right team for all their needs, whether that's college and then holidays, get married and then later on in life, more holidays when they retire. And they're with the Credit Union really from the cradle to the grave. All our loans are insured so that if a member takes a loan out of a Credit Union, and God forbid, for whatever reason, they die early or they die because their age has come, their loan is insured and their loan is quite cleared, which is a great help for some people. If there's a man that dies and the poor would think, you know, what about the loan? The loan is cleared. It's insured. It's a member's service. You mentioned their credit to the grave, but that's the way it is in a lot of families. There's just a tradition of joining the Credit Union early and that's the way it is. Yeah, well, we would have a lot of juvenile members and a lot of these juvenile members have been joined by their parents. So, the parents put them in when they're maybe a week old, maybe a month old. That may be a bit early. Well, no, that's what they do. That's what they do. That's a tradition, as you say, and then once they get to the age of 16, if they're going to college, they can get a student loan and the student loan is at a lower rate than a standard loan. But the idea is to save a little. We don't want a fortune of shares, but to save a little so that you appreciate money. And when it comes to you then looking for a loan, you have a little bit of excess there that you can say, well, I value money. I can save money, so now I'm going to borrow and pay you back. Some people might think that you need to have an awful lot saved in the Credit Union to ever approach for a loan, not necessarily the case, is it? No, in the olden days, what they used to do was it used to be maybe four to one, and that wasn't actually written in law. It was just sort of taken as a per se. So if you had a thousand, then you could get a loan of four thousand. But that wasn't a law, it wasn't a rule, it was just what people adhered to. Nowadays, it's all about ability to repay. So you could come on to any Credit Union in any show or anywhere else. You could have five hundred in shares and you could get a loan of five thousand, ten thousand, fifteen thousand, as long as you can show us that you have the ability to repay that loan. We will do the paperwork and we can get the money to you, as quick as what we can. And no matter who you are, and no matter what you're doing in life, we all need a loan for something or other along the way. It could be something as simple as the fridge breaks down or the washing machine breaks to, as you mentioned there, a holiday or a car or an extension, different things in life. You can get a loan for as little as fifty euro if you needed it, but you can get up to a loan of eighty thousand, that's the maximum that we can get about. That would be for maybe a big house repairs, so it could be paid back over ten years. And remember that loan was insured, so if something did happen, God forbid, in ten years, that loan was insured. The other thing too, that the savings of credit unions, and this is very important and the people don't realize this a lot, the savings that you put into a credit union before the age of fifty-five, okay, it's doubled up to a maximum of ten thousand after you pass away, as long as that money has been left in after the age of fifty-five. So say for example, some of the joints when they're twenty-five, they save up to their fifty-five, they have ten thousand in shares, they've borrowed and borrowed and borrowed and paid back and borrowed and borrowed and paid back, but the ten thousand is there. I still have ten thousand there, yeah. And you go for, but again you pass away at fifty-six, that ten thousand is doubled. Okay. So there's money there left for funeral expenses that they don't, so you don't really need more than ten thousand, two hundred in a credit union, but you can have as little as a hundred in a credit union borrow as long as you have the ability to repay. It's a big difference to the modus operandi of banks now. I know credit unions are not for profit, banks do have to make a profit, but nonetheless it's just when you outline things like that that in a way it's just a great example of the difference. Yeah well what we have to do is we have to make a surplus, so we have to make a surplus and we make that from the interest on loans and the interest on investments, but the investment money now is very poor. We have overheads as regards staff, we have 32 staff, we have four offices, so they all have to be maintained. Yeah. We have a lot of extra charges that the regular letters put on us that pays for the bank guarantee. We're still paying that, in actual fact we're not paying it, the members are paying it because it's coming out of the surplus, so we still have to make money at the end of the day, otherwise we won't be. Of course. The more members we have that borrow, whether it's small, medium or large, the more services that we can give back to the people that have any shown. That's one of the things that strike me about the credit union, anybody that I've spoken to that's involved in the credit union, keep mentioning loans. You might think that the opposite would be what they would be continually mentioning, oh, you know, join us and invest your money, but loans are just as important. Well, you know, at Money's Amazing over the last 18 years, I have a favorite saying, the name on the door says credit union. It doesn't say bank for your bank money, it doesn't say savings union, it says a credit union, and that's what we're there for. We're there to give out credit. People have this sort of, we thought that we were not giving out money, we are. People have this thought that you need to have a lot of savings, you don't, as long as you have the ability and show us to repay because it's not my money, it's not our money, it's the members' money. Just pour it to go, like every credit union, there's a members' draw and yours is a big one. Yeah, we started our members' draw probably about seven years ago in the Bunkrana office initially, and you know, the members' draw is 10 euro to get into the draw. There's two draws a year, so at the moment we have about 2,500 people in the draw, so that's 25,000. There's about 200 tickets out of that for expenses, for the tickets, the advertising, and the rest of that money is given back to the members, and there could be 15 prizes. First prize could be around 10,000, so one member and two and a half thousand is going to win 10,000. The smallest prize is about 500, there's about 15 prizes altogether. If we get more members to join the draw, it's not for profit, we'll have more draws. We could have four draws a year, we could have six draws a year, and remember it's the members that's in the draw that has the chance of one of the 10,000, not only from Dublin or Cork or Kerry, it's members in the show. And it's just a tenner and that gets you into the two draws. It's not 10 euro for each draw, there's one draw in July and one in January. One only thing just I'd like to say there, John, please. First of all I'd like to thank all the members, because without members we have no credit union. I'd like to thank all the staff over the years, because well again without staff we can't run a show, and I'd like to thank the volunteers, because myself I'm a volunteer, we don't get paid, but we had a lot of volunteers over the years who put a lot more into the credit union at the times that it was needed. Now there's money to pay for a lot of the services, a lot of the volunteers over the years, they've done this and they could have been out of a little bit of pocket because there wasn't enough money there to give them their expenses and things like that. You've been a volunteer director for 18 years. Yes. This is your second term as chair. So that's right commitment. Yeah well when I was telling somebody out there again today I'm the last director of the board that I went down to 18 years ago and there were nine of us. The other eight have either passed on or they have retired and they would have ones who have done a lot more work getting on chronic credit union to where it was. I remember going in one night and they told me that we are now a 40 million asset credit union but that would have been punts. Now any shown credit union is 106 million in euro. There were six staff back then. Now there's 32. There was one office. Now there's four and three main ones and a sub-office. But we need volunteers. We need people who will give up time and it's not that onerous leaving me a lie at times but we need good people and then they show them to help us. Okay and the more people the less that everybody has to do. The more people the less the rest of us. Okay Paul, next morning.