Catherine Connolly (Galway West, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I will come to that shortly. The opening statement from Mr. Brendan McDonagh today puts it in a nutshell. It states that the witness had a misplaced attachment to an accounting value rather than to the real accounts in the market. I will return to that. There is no doubt about what NAMA thinks of the witness's assessment. Mr. McDonagh believes that the Comptroller and Auditor General's report involves the mechanistic and rigid application of a spuriously precise and abnormally low discount rate to cashflows which are assumed, unrealistically, to be fixed and certain. There are many other comments of that nature, which I will return to and to which I am sure the other members will refer.

With regard to the process, many of the statements made by NAMA in public and many of its statements to the committee, culminating with its statement today, basically say that the witness did not have a clue, did not seek external advice, had no experience - I do not mean this personally but am simply putting its argument - that he failed to seek extra staff from outside and so forth. Will the witness deal with the issue of no external advice?