Mr. Frank Daly:

Thank you, Chairman. I'll be brief, it's been a long day for everybody. I want to make three points. The first is to emphasise again, as I did in my opening statement, that we are attending here as part of the solution. We were not the cause of the crash. We are essentially the ambulance, or whatever comes across, coming along afterwards to actually tidy it up. And then, you know, we're here because you are considering the appropriateness and effectiveness of the domestic policy response and NAMA was an element of that. I think there's two elements to that then: the appropriateness of it is one we have discussed, as to whether you go down the asset management agency route and we've had a general discussion about that. I'm not going to repeat it, but it is generally now acknowledged worldwide that where you have a crash of such proportions and where you have such a concentration of lending by financial institutions into a sector like property, that banks don't fix themselves and you have to take it off their books. I think we've generally discussed that.

There is some material, which I referred to earlier, by the ECB and wherever in relation to that theoretical, what is the correct approach, what is the appropriate approach, and to the extent that the inquiry may not have that, we would be happy to pass it on to you. So, you consider the theory of the appropriateness of the approach and then you must move on to the effectiveness, did it work? That was the theory, that was the approach; did it work in practice? And that's where you get in, I think, to NAMA's performance over the past five years, and to the figures that we have provided to the inquiry today and maybe updated figures that we can provide to the inquiry by November, or whenever you're going to write your report. We would say, and you won't be surprised, that NAMA has been a very effective response. I've outlined in the last page of my statement why and I'm not going to repeat it. I would just like to thank you, Chairman, and members of the committee and the staff for your courtesy.