Professor Alan Ahearne:

I mean, with an asset management company, there is always a tension between avoiding fire sales, but also avoiding hoarding. You want the asset management company ... you don't want them dumping all these assets onto the market at one stage, at one time, because there won't be enough liquidity there. If you are in a crisis and they have to sell them at very cheap rates, then they make huge losses. At the same time, you don't want them ... you don't want the asset management to be around in 20 years' time hoarding these. And that was the experience of the RTC, the Resolution Trust Corporation, in the United States. If I remember rightly, after a few years, Congress passed a law, kind of, forcing them to sell a bit more because it was felt that they weren't selling enough, that they were beginning to hoard. So, that's always a tension. It looks - and there are different reports that look at NAMA - it looks to me from the outside that that they probably got that about right. They were selling assets, but they tended to be foreign assets, often in the UK.

They were getting reasonable prices for those and therefore they were beginning, they were, they were paying off their senior debt. They held the Irish assets through 2011-12 but then there was a remarkable increase in the appetite for Irish assets over the last few years and they've sold into that. So by, by luck or by design, they seem to have, have got their timing about right.