Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

We are now in public session and are moving on to our normal, routine items. Before we do that, however, I want to make people aware of the discussions we had in private on our work programme and specifically on our examination of the special report of the Comptroller and Auditor General on Project Eagle, the sale by NAMA of its Northern Ireland loan book. I wish to confirm that we will be examining the report, as we are obliged to do, and that at our meeting on Thursday next, 29 September, the Comptroller and Auditor General will be our first witness and we will have a question-and-answer session with him. After that, we will move on to meet with the chairman and chief executive of NAMA. The latter will take up a considerable amount of time on Thursday afternoon.

On the following Thursday, 6 October, we will meet the Minister for Finance in the afternoon. It has been proposed to put arrangements in place to invite the other members of the board of NAMA to appear, as a group, and Mr. Brian Rowntree, who was a member of the Northern Ireland advisory board of the agency. We will also invite those who were party to the phone call with the Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, in early January 2014. The participants in that phone call were the Minister for Finance, Mr. Frank Daly, chairman of NAMA, Mr. Declan Reid from the Department of Finance, Mr. Ronnie Hanna, a NAMA staff member, the First Minister of Northern Ireland, Mr. Peter Robinson, and the Deputy First Minister, Mr. Martin McGuinness. The Minister for Finance, Deputy Noonan, and Mr. Frank Daly have already been confirmed as attendees. We will be asking Mr. Reid to attend. We will not be inviting Mr. Hanna at this stage because of other issues. We will also invite Mr. Robinson and Mr. McGuinness to attend a meeting. In addition, we will be inviting officials from NAMA and from the Department of Finance and, in particular, the officials who were liaising with each other in 2013 and 2014, including not just the current Secretary General of the Department of Finance but also the person who held that post at that time.

Following those few meetings, we will review the situation and determine where we go next with our examination of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report.