Gerald Nash (Louth, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will speak in support of the amendments. Reference was made to the necessity to undertake exercises of this nature in the committee's pre-legislative scrutiny report. This would be an important exercise in public accountability. If we reflect back less than a generation ago, this was a sorry chapter in the history of the State. There has been little real accountability, notwithstanding the work of the finance committee a number of years ago and the banking inquiry, and very little clarity about what happened, why it happened, who was responsible and so on. Any review is not to apportion blame; it is to have clear evidence.

This is a contested space, and I made reference to that in my Second Stage speech, as to whether or not the values realised on certain properties reflected market value at the time. We tend to look at these things, I accept, in retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight and with information that might not have been available at the time. All these things are open questions. Reviews have been done before. From what I can recall, Professor John FitzGerald had initiated a review of sorts at one point. I cannot quite recollect the general findings of that review, but now that NAMA has been given, for the want of a better description, a decent burial and the dust has settled on that chapter of recent Irish history, it is time we had a proper interrogation of what happened and an objective analysis of how NAMA performed. It would be a useful exercise in accountability and something we can learn from in the event that initiatives like this are considered or have to be considered in the future. Let us hope they do not because we are still dealing with the outworkings of the economic crash now, most evidently in the precarious nature of our dysfunctional housing system.

I support the amendments.