Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 20 September 2018

Public Accounts Committee

National Asset Management Agency: Financial Statements 2016 and 2017
Comptroller and Auditor General Special Report No. 102: National Asset Management Agency Second Progress Report

9:00 am

Mr. Brendan McDonagh:

We have had our loan portfolio sales and we trawled through those sales. As I explained, that sale involved 23 properties and, effectively, only four of those would have been potentially available. They were not taken up or were not going to be delivered at the time. We had subsequent loan sales in Project Emerald and Project Ruby. We went through those portfolios before they were sold and we went to the Housing Agency. We took almost 200 properties out of one portfolio and offered them to the Housing Agency. I think about 180 of them were taken up. In the other portfolio, which I think amounted to close to 300 units, we delivered about 250 units to the Housing Agency. We trawled through the portfolio and informed the agency that certain properties were available. These were properties that were unoccupied. Some of the properties we sold in the loan sales were already occupied. We cannot just kick people out of a property because they will have no place to go. They are sold with tenants in possession. We are certainly not going to make the problem worse. We trawled through the portfolios and pulled out as much as we could. The Housing Agency talked to local authorities and approved housing bodies and took up a certain amount. We are not blind to what is going on and we do our best to do as much as we can.

We did that in two subsequent loan sales.