Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

Okay, that has been explained clearly. What Mr. McDonagh is telling me is the Troika basically told the Government, which in turn told NAMA, to get on with the sales and the agency lost €4 billion in the first three years. It is generally accepted, if you look at the trajectory for property prices and value over, say, the past ten years, that there has been a fairly rapid rise back up again. That is what happened there. People will draw their own conclusions from that. After being stitched and told that we had to bail out Anglo Irish Bank, which I disagreed with, a failed bank where many of these loans resided, with all sorts of excuses given as to why we had to bail it out, including that the credit unions had all their money in it, which was not true, the Troika actually put the gun to the Government's head and in turn the gun was put to NAMA's head to sell off these loans at way below their value. A far better value could have been achieved two, three or four years later.

In reply to some Deputies, Mr. McDonagh said that developers held back their liability and exited NAMA. I am trying to frame this question as clearly as I can. Someone with ten acres in the middle of Dublin might have an impaired loan. They may have paid €100 million for that and an impaired loan of €100 million goes into NAMA. With a 57% discount, it would now be worth €43 million. In order to exit NAMA, does that person need to pay €43 million or €100 million.