Catherine Murphy (Kildare North, Social Democrats) | Oireachtas source

Much of that will not come as a surprise to us. The Minister would have been aware, by virtue of the fact that he would have received a letter from the Minister of Finance in Northern Ireland, that there was an interest in selling the Project Eagle loan book, which was brought as a package and was obviously referred to NAMA. The Minister would have been familiar with that from an early stage. Were any questions asked or did it strike the Department to consider, at that stage or at any stage into the future, how that loan book was assembled? Page 132 of the Comptroller and Auditor General's report states that the PIMCO analysis was conducted by way of reverse engineering NAMA's balance sheet and cross-referencing the publicly available information on NAMA's portfolio. Not all of the loans associated with the properties were based in Northern Ireland. It was approximately 50:50, with some in the UK and Germany. They are not all based in Northern Ireland and all of it would not have compromised the Northern Ireland property market. Given that was the case, did anybody in the Department carry out an analysis of how this came about or did the Minister have any discussions with NAMA on that? It is strange that one could put something together, just in a paper exercise, which would put together things whose common denominator is people who are from Northern Ireland, rather than the loans being based on properties in Northern Ireland. Did the Minister consider that at all?