Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The committee is now back in public session. We spoke with the Comptroller and Auditor General in the first part of the meeting about special report No. 94 on the National Asset Management Agency sale of Project Eagle. We have invited representatives of NAMA to discuss the report with the committee. We are joined by Mr. Frank Daly, chairman, Mr. Brendan McDonagh, chief executive officer, Mr. Brian McEnery, board member and chairman of the audit committee, Mr. John Coleman, chief financial officer, Ms Aideen O'Reilly, head of legal affairs and Mr. John Collison, head of residential delivery and formerly deputy head of asset recovery. We are also joined by a representative from the Department of Finance, Mr. Declan Reid, who is a specialist in the shareholding management unit.

I advise witnesses that by virtue of section 17(2)(l) of the Defamation Act 2009, they are protected by absolute privilege in respect of their evidence to the committee. If they are directed by the committee to cease giving evidence on a particular matter and they continue to do so, they are entitled thereafter only to qualified privilege in respect of their evidence. They are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and are asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, they should not criticise or make charges against any person or an entity by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

Mr. McDonagh will make the first statement. The meeting this morning went on a little longer than planned. That is why we are only starting now at 2 p.m. There will be a number of hours in the meeting so I propose to take a break after a couple of hours so everybody can have a cup of coffee. It can be a long session so if somebody needs a break for personal reasons, we will have no trouble adjourning at any stage. They should just let us know.