Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

The year 2009 was a different time. People may recall when the Minister for Finance at the time was putting legislation through the Dáil in 2009, people laughed at it. He asked, as part of going to the Oireachtas, for a business plan. We had no details of the assets and things yet but we had to put a business plan together for the Minister based on the limited information we had at the time. We said NAMA would return, I think, about €4.8 billion over its life, so we are in excess of that now. When the NAMA board came in in 2010, it said that it was not its plan and it wanted to put in its own plan. NAMA’s board said that if everything went according to the numerous assumptions - we published the assumptions, and we had more information at that stage on the portfolio that we got from the banks - and said if everything went right, we would probably make about €3.9 billion profit. It turns out we were making well in excess of that. That is how it came about.