Mr. Tom Parlon:

Well, obviously it was a bit like, I suppose, suck it and see. There were people who went in there and I think, to quote some Minister, they were hopelessly insolvent; who didn't have any other objection, but the banks handed over their loans, that were mainly based upon loans that were associated with property that had massively decreased in value and so on. So I think the bulk of the people in NAMA - all of them, practically - were as a result of property investments that the values had gone down and they'd overextended themselves.

So, you know, it took a long time and if we think back then, you know, it was sort of crisis mode for the construction industry. The period around when NAMA was being introduced, bank lending had stopped entirely, house building had practically stopped, there was nobody getting a mortgage or nobody ... the sentiment had turned totally in the opposite direction; nobody wanted to buy a house or know about property. So that was an extremely nervous time for the industry and, as I said earlier in my opening remarks, you know, the big issue was companies going out of business, people being laid off and people emigrating all over the world to try and find jobs in construction after they'd learn very good skills here. So, it was a very, very nervous time and we didn't know ... and, like I said earlier, the issue was and probably still would be debated by a lot of experts that would be more expert than me about, you know, was NAMA's intervention and all their different actions, did it, you know ... when they started there was a big concern that there was going to be, you know, major sell-offs.

And clearly if, in a weak market, you start selling off a massive lot of other stuff, it weakens the market further and the market will be in freefall. So, you know, the issue the industry have when we're ... if you attempt to build a house, and for a number of years after 2006 there was a carryover of stock, so when that can't be shifted, and there still, unfortunately, is a carryover in some of the regional towns and so on around the country, if the carryover can't be shifted you have little or no chance of starting building anything new. Very often the carryover is available at maybe half the price of the original construction. So that's the sort of timescale around our concerns about NAMA at that stage.