Mr. Frank Daly:

In my letter to the Minister after the report was published, which was provided to the Cabinet, we set out our views on the discount and have got no pushback from the Department or the Minister on that. We meet the Department officials regularly and there would be discussion of this. It is a matter to take up with the Minister and the Department because I do not want to speak for them. We have a view of the discount, the market has a view on it. In the past week or so when a lot of the noise died down about the initial launch of the report a couple of very well-respected columnists, including John FitzGerald, formerly of the Economic and Social Research Institute, and Paul McNeive in the Irish Independent, acknowledged quite forcefully that NAMA's view of the discount and its general approach to the result of the Project Eagle sale was valid.

Before anybody else asks, we had absolutely no interaction with either of those columnists. They are two very highly respected commentators who came in on this. We are back to discount and the question of whether had we held on to it to sell over the next five or ten years would we get a better return. We believe absolutely not. At the end of 2013, and I should have made this point earlier, we took an impairment charge in respect of Northern Ireland of £164 million. That is a very good indication of the way this portfolio was going.