Mr. Frank Daly:

Section 10 is very clear in that NAMA has a commercial remit and its objective must be to obtain the best financial return for the State. In our reading of the Act, this is its primary purpose and the one which overrides everything else. That is what drives us but we are also driven by a belief that the debt, whether the €32 billion that we started off with or the €7 billion senior debt we currently hold, is a contingent liability on the State and impacts in a greater sense on the State's standing in the money markets and its capacity to borrow.

That the State can borrow at extremely low rates at the moment, as acknowledged by the markets and the rating agencies, is due partly to the fact that NAMA was quite clear about its commitment to repay that debt. One of those, Moody's - the committee may not think much of these rating agencies and I have views on them myself - declared not long ago that NAMA is no longer a material contingent liability on the State. All of that is important. On top of that, we have used the cash we have generated not just to repay the debt, but also, as has been much mentioned here today, to buy and refurbish units for social housing. We have also worked on ghost estates with local authorities and local bodies in terms of sites for schools and local communities. There is a social overhang to everything we do. Unless we are actually commercial and unless we had generated the funds we did in the past seven years, we would not be able to do any of that work. We would not be funding 20,000 houses between now and 2020 and we would not have been able to deal with the social housing issue that we are discussing.

Many of the other questions relate to detail about units. The Chairman has already referred to that issue. We will give the committee as much detail as we can. We have not come here to criticise the local authorities in any way.