I want to inquire about amendment No. 1 as it appeared on Report Stage and to ask the Parliamentary Secretary if he will give me an indication of the general nature or form of the amendment he will propose in the Seanad.
Friendly Societies (Amendment) Bill, 1976: Fifth Stage.
Question proposed: "That the Bill do now pass."
It will be designed to achieve the same objective as the Deputy's amendment but it will be in the context of friendly societies legislation rather than credit union legislation.
So far as friendly societies are concerned, this Bill achieves some useful objectives but the friendly societies are the least important of all the various associations or institutions of the kind we have been talking about and of the kind for which the registrar of friendly societies is responsible. Now that the least important of these various fields has been brought up to date let us get on with the work of bringing up to date the ones that count. There is a crying need for modernisation and amendment of our Companies Act, 1963. The Parliamentary Secretary has only to look at what has happened in the last few weeks in relation to a certain supermarket chain which went into liquidation in order to realise what the crying need is. There are considerable difficulties at present being encountered by industrial and provident societies in the form of agricultural co-operatives where the shareholding of members is very limited and where the societies are trying to evolve a satisfactory system of higher shareholding by means of what is called revolving capital, which is not envisaged by the industrial and provident societies and which has given rise to a lot of legal difficulties. There are needs, as has been made clear in the debate on the Committee and Report Stages here, for the bringing up to date of the law relating to credit unions even though the Act was passed only ten years ago. Inflation has had such an effect on the figures there that it was essential that those figures be increased on the lines which the Parliamentary Secretary has agreed in principle to do.
Friendly societies are very limited in number, in scope and in their financial significance. The Parliamentary Secretary has told us in his opening speech that the turnover of the whole lot of them in the past year was only £600,000. He should bear in mind that one building society would turn over more than that in a week. For that reason alone, while welcoming what has been done in relation to friendly societies, I strongly urge the Parliamentary Secretary to take immediate steps to modernise in a similar way the law relating to companies and to industrial and provident societies in particular.
I agree with the Deputy that there is a need for a substantial body of law reform in the areas mentioned by him. One of the important and, to some extent, novel elements in this legislation is that it takes power to effect a lot of these matters by order and to modernise them by order on a continuing basis, subject to those orders being debated here in the House and voted upon if necessary, rather than just made by default. The type of provision in this legislation will to some extent prevent law getting out of date in the way the legislation that the Deputy referred to has got out of date, because if it is to be amended there has to be a full-dress debate in the House with all the preparation and delay that that involves.
One of the reasons why law goes out of date is that Ministers and Deputies try to include in it excessively rigid provisions which become out of date in the way that the Deputy sought to introduce some provisions into this legislation which I sought to oppose and successfully did so.
Question put and agreed to.