Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

We have said publicly that we are confident we will pay off the senior and subordinated debt if current market conditions prevail. We said when the Minister launched the section 227 review of NAMA that we hoped to generate a surplus.

We would not be prepared to quantify the surplus because market conditions have changed so quickly and we are subject to macro-economic risks. People thought at the start that we overpaid for the assets because of the way the EU scheme was designed. We overpaid the banks by €6 billion and we had to claw that back first. We had a big fall in the property market in the meantime and now we are seeing a reversal of that. If we took those two liabilities from the taxpayers' back, that would be a good outturn. Everything after that would be a bonus but it is probably too early to speculate on what that would be.