Mr. Frank Daly:

There would be regular dialogue between the Minister and us, mainly with me, as the chief executive officer indicated earlier. It would have ranged over the whole performance of NAMA, where we were going, the timeline, debt repayment and all of that. Perhaps 2014 is a good example as at that stage we were evaluating in particular the pace at which we were monetising the portfolio. At that stage things were happening in the market that gave us more confidence that we could get good value for assets and loans. We would have had that conversation with the Minister. I go back to the point made earlier by Deputy Connolly as no directions were given to us in that regard. These are things we would be continuously evaluating ourselves. I remember we had a fairly extensive strategy discussion in 2014, with various options as to where we could go. We also had a section 227 report around that time, which was an evaluation by the Department of Finance about where NAMA was going and all of that. From this emerged a view that we would accelerate the monetisation of the portfolio while the market was good.

Also arising from that came the housing element. As I said earlier, NAMA was not set up to be a housing agency or anything like that and one would not find any reference in the Act to housing. However, from 2014, we began to fund the building of houses quite extensively. The outcome of that was that in the past four years, as mentioned earlier, we have delivered something like 10,500 houses and another 2,500 units of social housing. I made the point earlier that in that period, despite NAMA not being the housing agency or anything like it, NAMA delivered approximately 25% of all housing that was developed.