Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

The reason we have garden leave is because of an issue that was raised by the Committee of Public Accounts in 2012 and 2013. The committee said that people were leaving NAMA and jumping straight into the private sector and that it was not good that they were bringing their knowledge from NAMA straight over to the other side of the table. The NTMA is the employer, not NAMA. It introduced garden leave provisions so that when anybody leaves NAMA, they have cold storage periods before they can start working anywhere else. Garden leave provisions are typically three months' contractual leave but if somebody says they have been offered a job somewhere that is unrelated to NAMA, we might reduce that to two months. That is just a way of ensuring somebody does not leave NAMA and go straight into somebody across the table.