Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The witnesses are probably not going to acknowledge this point but it is worth saying, because it is what everybody else thinks, that it is not just about what the State could have sold the loans at had we held on to them but it is also about what it could have used them for instead of selling them. To my mind this is the biggest scandal of it all. The State had the biggest property portfolio in the world in its hands and it decided to flog it off at bargain basement prices and now we have a massive housing crisis. To me, this is the legacy. It would be fair to characterise NAMA as the greatest property heist the world has ever seen. I presume the witnesses will not acknowledge this but it is self-evident when we look at the value of those properties now and the prices and rents being charged for houses. If the State had kept them, we could have delivered social and affordable housing. We would not have a housing crisis. The people who bought them often sat on them for long periods to manipulate the value of those properties upwards.

It is an absolute scandal beyond belief. The question I have now - given that we are dealing with this proposed legislation - is whether NAMA has got anything left. My view was that it should have been developed as a State construction company for public and affordable housing. Now that we have a housing deficit that is way beyond what the Government had even acknowledged, is there anything left that we could possibly use to address the housing crisis or are all its assets gone?