Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

As Mr. Daly outlined, the Department of Finance did a review of NAMA in 2014. It was like a Comptroller and Auditor General's section 226 report. A review must be undertaken by the Minister under section 227 and he did one in 2014. It said that NAMA was a big contingent liability for the State, a huge debt was still overhanging it, the national debt was up to €200 million and NAMA should move as expeditiously as possible towards extinguishing that contingent liability by selling assets. That is what we did. The Minister concurred with NAMA's strategy but that strategy was informed by what the Minister and the Government thought we should be doing.

There are many different people with different responsibilities. The primary responsibility for housing sits with the Department of Housing, Planning and Local Government. Do I see that there is a big housing crisis? I certainly do. Do I agree with Deputy Murphy that we could see the property market beginning to recover in 2012 and 2013? I certainly did see that as I outlined during previous committee appearances. There is a finite point to what people can pay. If we look at the CSO statistics, which I am happy to provide to the committee if members do not have them to hand, we can see that the Central Bank's limits for mortgages is 3.5. We are at 3.4 in Dublin as of 2018. If people cannot get a mortgage at more than 3.5, house prices cannot go above that because people will not get mortgages to buy them. That does not mean that people will not build stock-----