Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

For me, all properties offered by NAMA would have been suitable. The history has been that we would bring them to standard before handing them over as social housing. If there is money for investment, we would have done it. The feedback we got was that they were the wrong product type and sometimes local authorities said they were in the wrong location. We were dealing with local authorities through the Housing Agency, which co-ordinated the process. The feedback from the Housing Agency was that many local authorities had the view that they had sufficient levels of social housing in many of the areas in which we were offering properties.

There was a sort of generic response we used to hear quite often where if an estate already had 20% social housing and we offered additional units, the authority would indicate that its own rules dictated that once 20% was reached, it did not want to take more units in the estate. That was not our decision but rather the decision of the Housing Agency and local authority.