Ms Marie Hunt:

It is a very complex issue but if one buys an asset and buys it on the basis of a 20-year lease with upward-only rent reviews, that is a contract and one has an understanding of what is going to happen with the income. Therefore, if somebody comes in overnight and says the contract is to be torn up and one is no longer entitled to those upward-only rent reviews, it undermines confidence. In the period 2009 to 2012, we had a huge amount of uncertainty about this issue and on whether the reviews were going to be amended or not. If one looks at transactional activity, one sees virtually no transactions happened as a result. The minute it was announced in the budget in December 2011 that this was taken off the table for constitutional reasons, international investors began to engage and, indeed, NAMA began to release assets to the market. Nobody was going to buy anything in Ireland, regardless of what price it was, if there was uncertainty about the income flow or the potential of that income to grow over time.