Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Wednesday, 22 April 2015
Committee of Inquiry into the Banking Crisis
Nexus Phase
Mr. Frank Daly:
Well I think I was making the point in my statement that you have to start with the financial return. That's our ... that's what's in the Act. We can't depart from that. There is a secondary objective in the Act of a social and economic dividend and the way we try to reconcile it ... first of all, by saying that, and I have said this before, is that the best social and economic dividend, I think, that we can get out of all of this is that NAMA is successful then that our senior debt is repaid and if we have a surplus then that in itself is an economic and a social dividend because that billion can go wherever the Government decides to put it. Side by side with that, it is everything from social housing that we spoke about earlier. It is the funding of much needed, if I can put it, ordinary housing in Dublin, which we are doing. We have committed to 4,500 of those by the end of 2016. We are examining the potential in what would be our asset base to ... for another 20,000 to be delivered over the ensuing five years. It is the whole docklands SDZ area which we really haven't referred to today, which is economic in the sense that it is going to provide much needed grade A office accommodation for FDI and other local industry. It is social in the sense that in that mix there will be residential accommodation as well. It is the ... and then all of the other stuff in relation to the sites that we have engaged with Department of Education in relation to schools, Department of Health and the HSE in relation to primary care centres and all of that. And then all of the, I do not want to sound pejorative, but all of the local stuff where we have engaged sometimes with representatives like yourselves, where there is a local community group or sporting group or whatever and they are interested in a particular facility or piece of land or building and we do our utmost to actually engage on that. So it is all of that is the social dividend. I don't think it conflicts with our commercial objective. Sometimes it's a balancing act to actually run the two together but I think we try to do our best.
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