Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 12 May 2016
Committee on Housing and Homelessness
National Asset Management Agency
10:30 am
Mr. Frank Daly:
No. We are continually scouring our portfolio and we have always done that. We had a meeting yesterday with the Minister with responsibility for housing which was very useful. He has encouraged us to look again at our portfolio to see whether we can find more for social housing. We have said we will do that and we are confident that we can come up with several hundred additional units which we will offer to the local authorities as soon as we possibly can. We will do that fairly soon. We will continue to do that and we will continue to look at the possibilities around the 20,000 units we hope to deliver by 2020 to see whether we deliver them faster.
I ask the committee not to forget that there is a state aid complaint in Brussels about which we have to be very careful. In some ways, that goes back to the Deputy's earlier point. The substantive defence to the state aid complaint is that NAMA is acting commercially. The day we stop acting commercially in that area is the day we will be in trouble with Brussels. I do not think anybody wants that because that has the potential to hold things up and not to get the 20,000 houses that NAMA proposes to build. I will ask Mr. Brendan McDonagh or Mr. Martin Whelan to respond to other questions.
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