Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

Some of the public commentary about some of these funds where people have been asked about the removal of tenants were not portfolios which originated from NAMA. We have never said to people that they need to get out of a property. That is not policy and many times, in fairness to the debtors, if somebody is renting the property and debtors have been getting income from that, they would always have the view that they would not evict somebody. Receivers have a different view on that, are independent of NAMA and operate independently, but we have never asked anybody to remove tenants from a property prior to sale.

On the Deputy's second point, the write-down of debt, from our point of view, we bought €74 billion worth of loans and paid €32 billion because the assets were only worth that. We try to get back as much of the €74 billion as possible but the reality is that we have gone after debtors. We took €800 million of additional assets from debtors as part of working with NAMA. Some had transferred loans to third parties, and we went after them legally and forced them to hand them back. Others gave up the unencumbered assets voluntarily. It is only when the debtor has sold all the assets and has no other residual assets left that we get a sworn statement of affairs and we do asset searches on people, and think about the possibility of writing-down debt. Much of our debt write-down has happened because of another legal process. When somebody goes bankrupt, that person's debt is effectively written off, because that is what happens in a bankruptcy process, and if all the assets have been sold, one cannot go after a debtor that has gone through a bankruptcy process. We have written-down very little debt to date. Of the €32 billion that we paid, to date, we have only written off about €230 million where there was no prospect of recovery.