Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

On our sales to vulture funds, while I understand the Deputy's position, we wanted to take advantage of the capital coming into Ireland. The funds were coming here to buy portfolios. They were buying portfolios all across the world, including in the UK and in Europe. They came to Ireland. They were not here up until 2014. They arrived here in 2014 and their first real foray into deploying much capital in Ireland was in the liquidation of the Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, IBRC. Once a fund bought a large amount of the IBRC, other international funds came in on the back of people who bought funds from IBRC and bought funds from NAMA.

In any portfolio that one sells, one sells different types of assets, and some of that is land. As I said in my presentation, a potential 20,000 units of the 50,000 sold were bought by these funds. These funds are not long-term holders of these assets. That is not their business model. Their objective is to get their money back quickly so that they can negotiate to sell down the portfolio on a piecemeal basis. A thing which these funds do which NAMA cannot do is to sell the assets back to the original debtor. That allows the original purchaser to refinance it at times. The fund having it is only a staging post, because it is never going to be a long-term holder. It is going to be sold on to somebody else, so it is going to come back into the system at some stage, because these funds, with international capital raised from US colleges, endowment funds or international pension funds, do not want to hold land in Ireland long-term. They have bought the asset at a price and are trying to make a profit on selling that asset again.

The Deputy raised an issue about tenants. We have seen much commentary on this, and we have never sought to empty properties of tenants when they are being sold. Some of the properties, which have been emptied of tenants claimed on the back of these funds, have been of loan portfolios which were never in NAMA, but were sold by other banks.