Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Deputy, when we sell assets we take ... we look at asset sales, we make decisions, we take advice ... appropriate advice, and we openly market them ... the properties and where there's multiple bids on the property, we obviously try and get the best price we can. We don't have the luxury and we don't have the magic wand of knowing when is the absolute perfect time to sell a particular asset. There are, of course, individual examples of where some assets were sold and they have been sold on for higher values but that has to be put into the context as well of people risking their capital in the market at the time when nobody was risking their capital in the market and they were coming in to make bids for the assets. We made a very conscious decision that between 2010 and 2012, we held back on putting assets into the Irish market, despite everybody telling us we should be putting them onto market and accepting much lower prices. We only sold €1 billion worth of assets. As of today, we have sold €6 billion worth of assets and most of that ... €4 billion of that mostly came from 2013 onwards as the market improved. And, you know, there's many other examples of assets where we sold where we got very good prices and people subsequent to them haven't sold them at the price that they bought them from NAMA.

So, I think you know, even the private equity people who bought some assets in the Irish market have sold on individual examples of assets to people who made profits subsequent to that. So, that's the market, that's the model that's there and you know, do I wish that I had a magic ... that every single time I sold an asset, that would be the maximum peak of the asset and nobody else would make any profit on it? Of course I would in terms on behalf of the taxpayer but in terms of the information that we have at the time, we make the best decision we can, and we don't make it lightly, to sell the assets and of course there will be individual examples. You can't dispose of 60,000 individual units where you are going to find that every single time you have hit the market at the optimal time but there are certainly many more examples which nobody talks about where we have made substantial profits and it was the right time to sell and nobody talks about that.