Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

The conversation that has been had in the last few minutes exemplifies why internal rate of return is a meaningful performance metric for the activity that NAMA is engaged in. I have never attempted to say what the figure should be. That is something for political debate, or a debate between NAMA and the Department of Finance, and is to be explained here. I believe I heard Mr. McDonagh say that when the state aid figure was being calculated, a discount rate of 15% was used. Therefore, immediately, one has a figure of 10.3%, to which Deputy Catherine Connolly referred, as compared with the 15%. In the previous paragraph one has the 3.4% as compared with the 5%. This is the kind of conversation that I would envisage that we would always have at the Committee of Public Accounts about this kind of activity. Part of the reason that the EROI was developed was that in the first report, I recommended that the internal rate of return should be used and the targets should be set. In fairness to NAMA, it did have a conversation about it and came up with EROI and discussed it with us. To my mind, it did not fully serve the purpose.