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

I, too, welcome the deputy First Minister and thank him for taking some time out of his obviously very busy schedule. Some 50% of the actual properties to which loans were attached were located in Northern Ireland but the common denominator was that the loans were all Northern Ireland owned. We heard from Mr. Ellingham of NAMA that the Northern Ireland portfolio was the most difficult of all the agency's portfolios. There was a great degree of non-co-operation. He went so far as to say – I am paraphrasing – that there seems to have been a preference for working with a vulture fund rather than the southern entities. Could there have been a strategy behind that based on the view that non-co-operation might have resulted in a better outcome? Would Mr. McGuinness care to comment on that because, when the comment was made, it jumped out at us?