About the cooperative

Licences, supervision and governance

The cooperative belongs to the residents who join it. The Republic licenses what it does and holds it to the ecological budget. Ireland licenses how it holds money and applies the rules binding any payment institution.

The legal basis in the Republic

The Constitution plans the economy in real quantities and abolishes currency understood as a store of value, an instrument of accumulation or a claim upon the labour of others. It contains no prohibition on a resident obtaining goods made abroad, and it fixes the terms on which that happens.

An import is authorised where domestic capacity is absent, and where capacity exists and stands unused the plan develops it first. Materials and energy embodied in an import count against the same ecological budgets as domestic production, so a purchase here consumes the budget of the Republic.

This cooperative holds an import authority under the organic law on external trade and coordinates with other cooperatives by negotiated agreement and with the planning bodies through the Congress, as any cooperative does.

The legal basis in the European Union

The cooperative is incorporated in Ireland as a cooperative society and authorised there as a payment institution. That authorisation lets it hold an account reachable by ordinary euro transfer, pay a seller anywhere in the single market, and keep member balances apart from its own funds.

The obligations follow the authorisation: safeguarding of client funds, identification of every member, records of the source of incoming sums, screening against the sanctions lists, reporting of suspicious transactions, and an annual audit whose report is filed and published.

A member has the protections any customer of an Irish payment institution has, including the right to have the balance back on demand and the right to complain to an ombudsman at no cost.

Where the two systems disagree

Irish law treats a member balance as the member's property, transferable and inheritable. The law of the Republic treats it as no property at all: it passes to no one, secures no debt, and buys nothing the plan supplies.

The cooperative satisfies both by keeping every balance outside the Republic and treating it inside the Republic as an instruction to buy something abroad. A member who emigrates takes the balance with them. A balance left by a member who dies returns to the pool.

How the members govern it

What the cooperative publishes

Complaining

A complaint is made in writing at a teller, which answers within twenty-one days. Where that answer fails to satisfy, the board reviews the matter at its next sitting and gives reasons.

After that the route depends on the subject. Complaints about the holding, safeguarding or return of money go to the Financial Services and Pensions Ombudsman in Ireland, and the cooperative is bound by the outcome. Complaints touching a right of a resident go to the Defender of Rights here, which takes a complaint in any language of record and requires no other remedy to have been tried first.

A complaint about the use of common resources, including the export pool, goes to the Audit Office. Ten thousand residents may open an audit by petition, and the cooperative cannot refuse.