Kieran O'Donnell (Limerick City, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

However, when NAMA was actually implemented, the scale of the write downs was, on average, 57%. That is a big leap from an average of 22%. The question is how we got to that point. Dr. Bacon's report that was presented to Government on 20 March 2009 is a very detailed report that specifically goes down through each bank and Dr. Bacon specifically indicates how the €158 billion of loans is made up for each of the individual banks. That gave rise to a write-off of the order of €34.4 billion, which was a 22% average discount. We then come to a situation where, when the abridged version was published on 8 April, Dr. Bacon was looking at €74 billion of loans with a write-off of €42.2 billion, which is about 57% of a discount. When Dr. Bacon was writing his report for 20 March, if he had known that the discounts were going to be of the order of nearly 60%, would he have recommended the establishment of NAMA?