Pearse Doherty (Donegal, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

We would be having a different conversation because instead of crystallising a €40 billion loss, we would be talking about a fraction of that. I agree that it would be a very different conversation about the taxpayers' losses that were incurred not by NAMA but by Nationwide and the reckless lenders of bankers in Anglo, AIB and Bank of Ireland. That loss would have been less. That is the point I am making. This was supposed to be a management agency. Politicians and the Department came in and decided to find a floor and sell at the wrong time - the worst time. In doing that, billions of euro were lost to the Irish taxpayer. I take offence when this is then packaged as NAMA being a great success and making a €5 billion profit when the reality is that it crystallised tens of billions of euro of loss in terms of how the assets of the State, which the taxpayer paid very dearly for, were managed by that organisation.