Mr. John Corrigan:

That is a very good question from Deputy Murphy. I will talk about my own position in that I straddled the two organisations. I was chief executive of the NTMA and I was ex officiothen on the board of NAMA. I would have characterised myself as a non-executive on the board of NAMA. In my head I was acutely aware of the pressure that was on to make progress with liquidating, so to speak, NAMA’s balance sheet. There was pressure from the ECB. It was general pressure really. I attended a lot of meetings with the troika. On the Irish side, the Secretary General of the Department of Finance and the Governor of the Central Bank would also have attended.

From my point of view, and also from Ireland’s point of view, 2013 was a year where we were poised to come out of the IMF-EU programme. The question which was being discussed at the time was whether we would come out of the programme or if we would have to go into a second programme. Those were real issues that were being discussed at the time. From the point of view of the particular brief of the NTMA there was also the question, which was very relevant, of whether we could come out of the programme under our own steam, so to speak. There was also the question of the rating agencies, which had downgraded Ireland through the period we were in the programme. In fact one of them, Moody's, I think it was, had us in sub-investment grade status. The rating agencies in general adopted a very strange approach towards NAMA. While technically the NAMA bonds were off the State’s balance sheet, because they were only guaranteed by the Government, they were real liabilities. From a statistical point of view they were not on the State’s balance sheet, but when the ratings agencies looked at them, they actually put them on the balance sheet. A number of them, in particular I think it was Standard & Poor’s, gave no credit then on the asset side for the value of the NAMA assets, so a very aggressive approach was being taken by the ratings agencies. There was general pressure on but in my experience at the NAMA board meetings, NAMA looked at its sales programmes, its sales process and its strategy purely in the context of the NAMA Act and the question of-----