Credit Unions top the list of reputable Irish organisations

Brendan Burgess said:
The CUs were bailed out by the taxpayer. They were huge depositors in the Irish banks. If the Irish banks had not bailed out the depositors such as the Credit Unions, a lot of the Credit Unions would have gone bust.
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The retail depositors in Irish banks were bailed out by the taxpayer.

Defaulting on the retail depositors would have led to riots, possibly worse.

Our credit rating was plummeting. It is now quite good. If the banks hadn't been funded to bail out the retail deposit holders, we would be a mini-Argentina or Albania.
 
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walktothewater said:
Our credit rating was plummeting. It is now quite good. If the banks hadn't been funded to bail out the retail deposit holders, we would be a mini-Argentina or Albania.
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No we wouldnt have. And I know more about the bail-out than anyone else on this site!

There were costs and benefits associated with both options. I don’t think the result would have been all that different with defaulting on bondholders. Ireland would have paid higher new borrowing costs for a few years but less on the old borrowings.

People tend to forget that the lockout from global financial markets was short: May 2010 to February 2012. Irish debt is cheaper than French debt now.
 
Credit unions are not one large organisation
There have been some consolidation in the sector but they are independent entities not branches.

Back in the day they were a lot more of them, standards of management etc varied and while they had similar rules etc they were not financially linked to each other.
 
There are indeed many with branches now, my own one is now one of the biggest and the various credit unions it merged with are now branches.
Pre consolidation it was 6, or maybe more, independent entities,

I think only the employer based ones have remained in-consolidated and I’m not sure about all them. The gardai and ESB ones were the biggest and probably remain so. Run very differently back in the day to the community based ones.
 
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